Seasons greetings and happy holidays friends. It is time once again to reveal this year's Christmas picture, but this time, there's a lot to talk about. This one marks my 20th picture. I've been doing these every year now for 20 years....that's nearly half my life. I'd like to talk a little bit about the history behind this. Back in 2004, the first picture I did was one of my own characters (used completely out of context of her story) and another artist's character I was following. It was just something I did for the fun of it, I never imagined that it would be the start of a yearly tradition for myself. The reception online for it was decent as I only really posted my work there, so I figured, what the heck, why don't I print the work out and give it to my friends, coworkers, and family? I still remember the reaction a lot of my coworkers had when I presented them their copies. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but many of them were treating the work as if it was something really special and were trying to find like some sort of protected covering for it. Then there was the one co-manager who looked at his copy, said, 'Oh that's cool,' and then folded it up and put it in his front shirt pocket. Still makes me laugh when I think about how everyone else was treating it so delicately. The following year, I decided try again with another Christmas themed pic once again using one of my own characters and another online friend's character. Same deal, reception was good, printed out, the reaction was the same, people loved it. In 2006, I decided to keep the idea going, only this time and going forward, I would only use my own characters, out of context of their own stories of course. As the years went by, whenever Christmas rolled around, people were asking me if I was going to do another picture. I was thinking to myself, wow, people really like the stuff I do. One person even told me once that it wasn't Christmas until they had received their picture from me. You know, that's nice. It does my heart good to know that people really do appreciate the work I put out every year. So I made a promise that as long as I was able, I would always try to put out a new pic every year. For 20 years now, I have kept that promise much to the delight of many people. This year, I wanted to do something a little different. As the years went by, there were some characters that I ended up creating solely for the purpose of appearing in these Christmas themed pieces. Typically, I'd use only two of my characters for one such piece. Ambitiously, I decided to use SIX of them for this occasion. My two mice characters appear in the lower right of this piece and are named after my aunt and uncle Steve and Joann. They're usually characters that I use for really warm couples moments. My two raccoon characters that appear in the lower left are the newest characters I created back in 2022 and are named Kurt and Diane after two good friends of our family. Diane had sadly passed away that year so I wanted to do something to keep her memory alive. Finally, the two cats that appear on both the upper sides of this piece are characters that I typically used for snow themed ideas. I jokingly call them my 'snow cats'. They are as of yet unnamed, but I'm sure I'll eventually call them something. This piece took WAY longer than I anticipated. I hope you all enjoy this one as it really took a lot of effort to get done before Christmas this year. I wish you all a safe and merry Christmas and a far better 2025.