Chapter III · Christmas · 60 days
Seven a.m., and nobody is dressed yet.
Carollers, skating ponds, and the paper everywhere.
The paper flying on Christmas morning. Carollers at your own front door. The whole village out on the skating pond. Every tradition here was old when your grandparents were young, and yours is the family inside it.
Christmas Morning
4 traditions
Saint Nicholas Fireside
The old midnight-visit painting — his lamp, his red, his sack of wooden toys, and not a soul awake but you.
Avercamp Winter Scene
Dutch Golden Age ice — skaters, windmills, a frozen canal, a pale sky.
Carollers at the Door
Lanterns, songbooks, snow on the shoulders — a Victorian carolling scene at a lit front door.
Winter Hunters' Landscape
The Bruegel winter — a high view over a snowed village, the subject in the foreground with the dog.
The one rule
The face stays. Everything else is repainted.
We are a family of artists, and the holiday art we kept being sent was one look with the colours swapped: orange in October, red in December. That is a costume, not a tradition. So each room here has its own painters behind it — Currier & Ives and Nast, the Brandywine and Hudson River schools, Rackham, Whistler, Bruegel in the snow and the magazine covers of the 1940s — and none of the four would recognise the others.
What we keep is you. The faces, the coats, the dog and the front of your house are held exactly as you sent them, and a judge scores every painting for likeness before you see it. We paint children here, and only here: a parent or guardian signs for every photograph with a child in it, the darker Halloween shelf is closed to them, and every painting with a child is looked at twice before it is shown and once more, by a person, before it is printed.
Most of the AI work doesn’t resonate with us either. We spent months on these rooms so that at least one of them resonates with you.