Millennials Are Keeping Family Holiday Cards Alive

Six years ago, Ken Sarafin created his inaugural family Christmas card. Harnessing the aesthetic of Norman Rockwell—the 20th-century painter known for conveying the everyday life of Middle America—Sarafin illustrated a portrait of his sister, her husband, and their then-newborn daughter. The painting showed Sarafin’s niece crying on the floor, with her father nearby wearing a disheveled tie and drinking a martini, and her mother talking on the phone while mixing something in a bowl; in the background sat a small, scraggly, Charlie Brown–esque Christmas tree. “We were kind of going for 1950s Americana and its traditional gender roles on that one,” Sarafin recently told me.

At the time, Sarafin—a 33-year-old graphic designer in Denver who doesn’t have children of his own—saw the card as a fun opportunity to put his painting hobby, and his newfound affinity for Rockwell’s style, to use. It was also a way to bond with his family—and to poke fun, , and . Sarafin and his sister had never been fans of “Christmas cards that are overly cheesy and cutesy and ,” he says. He’s illustrated a similar portrait of his sister’s family in disarray every Christmas since.