For a few years there, it became almost a joke in our family the amount of photoshopping that went into our Christmas cards. A little teeth-whitening, a little crow’s feet diminishing, and–the year we took pics two weeks after my giving birth to our third child–a little figure slimming!

Of course (not that I’m biased or anything) our kids are pretty stinking cute and typically require no editing.

 [Of course, posing is not always our forte… Li’l Bro, put your foot down!]

Ahem, but I digress.

I have been known to switch around a head or two between photos to get everyone smiling or at least looking at the camera, like this one of Li’l Bro: that head’s from a totally different shot… And I changed a few ornament colors on the tree to coordinate with our outfits… And I might have whitened teeth and softened wrinkles just a smidge.

This card I mentioned yesterday, from 2006, was tweaked just a bit: I replaced my head with another from this roll, hence the green hair, since this head was originally next to the green sweater Big Bro was wearing.

Then there’s this shot that eventually made the 2010 Christmas card. Y’all, we had a 1st grader, a preschooler, and a two-week-old. We were hanging on by a thread. I thought about captioning the card “Sleep in Heavenly Peace??”

It needed a little love to tighten it up for the card… Weight loss “plastic surgery” has never been so painless as I digitally thinned out my post-baby physique. That’s a bit of all right. I think the funniest thing in this card is that when I moved us over to be “in front” of the tree, I made our sofa a two-pillow back instead of three… You can see just above Hub’s sleeve is a little fuzzy in the final cut where the shift was blended. But no one ever busted us on the sofa or my post-baby body. Good times.

Mission accomplished. Can you see the differences? (You can click image below to enlarge)

[And for the record: I didn’t do any surgical editing this year or last… Are we getting better with age? …Or is my vision just fading??]

So what do you say, is it cheating to edit Christmas card photos?