What colour is Christmas?

Too often I hear people criticize a card or decoration as not being "the colour of Christmas".  What is the colour of Christmas?  For some people it is and always will be red, green and white.  But why?  Why can't Christmas be blue and white or white and silver or yellow and green or just about any colour in the rainbow? Is the holiday diminished by the colours we choose?

My own answer is a resounding "NO!"  Christmas is whatever colour makes you happy.  Christmas can be any colour or colours that make you feel like loving everyone and giving and celebrating.  Christmas can be a rainbow.

I began thinking about colour and Christmas when I noticed that I hadn't used one inch of my Sweater Weather Designer Paper.  Believe me, here in Alberta it is definitely sweater weather at the moment.  Actually it feels more like several layers of sweaters-type-of-weather.  As I leafed through the Designer Paper, thinking that since I hadn't used it for Thanksgiving or, actually, anything, perhaps it would make a good Christmas card.  Well, those of you who own the Designer Paper know that it doesn't have what some would call conventional Christmas colours.

And I thought, what colour is Christmas---and all the stuff you've already read.

So I took a 3 3/4" x 5" piece of the Sweater Weather Designer Paper and proceeded to make a Christmas card.  The primary colours in the piece I cut were Soft Sky, Chocolate Chip, Sahara Sand and Crushed Curry.  After pulling a piece of each cardstock out of my files, I finally decided that the base cardstock would be Crushed Curry.  My next layer became Chocolate Chip and then we had the Designer Paper next.  The combination looked great---really, really great, actually.  Did it make me think of Christmas?  Not a bit!

So I began looking through my stamp sets and rejected them one by one until I came to the hostess set, Warmth & Wonder.  The deer was perfect!  I had a beginning!   So I cut a piece of Whisper White cardstock with my second-to-smallest Oval Framelit and cut a piece of Chocolate Chip cardstock with my third-to-smallest Oval Framelit for the backing.  First I stamped the tree from that set using Sahara Sand ink, then I stamped the ornaments in the set over the tree using Soft Sky ink, and finally I stamped the little deer using Chocolate Chip ink.  Since I wanted the deer to appear to be walking in snow, I cut another section of oval in Whisper White and tore a small piece from an end jaggedly.  I glued that over the bottom section of the Whisper White oval, covering the bottoms of the deer's feet, and managed the illusion of snow.

I adhered the stamped Whisper White oval to the Chocolate Chip oval and then, after first adhering a section of the Burlap Ribbon to the card layers, adhered the oval over that using dimensionals.  For my greeting I used a combination of the "celebrate" from my Fabulous Phrases stamp set and "Christmas" from the sold-out Endless Greetings stamp set.  I cut that using the Scallop Oval Punch and also cut a backing of Chocolate Chip using my Large Oval Punch.  That was also mounted on dimensionals.

Don't the Chocolate Chip and Crushed Curry Candy Dots look perfect as an accent?  

So, what is the colour of Christmas?  Whatever colour makes you happy inside.