Greeting Card Campaign: December 23 Roots Day

Click here to download free Roots Day Card

December 23 is the made-up holiday "Festivus" (for the rest of us). Actually, it's a depressing holiday made up by the TV show Seinfeld as a sort of anti-Christmas. So I'm going with something else. A nice holiday is a genealogy celebration. It's Roots Day, a great day to celebrate your heritage. It's a good holiday for the Christmas season since Christmas, Hanukkah and other holidays draw families together to celebrate.

Digging up your roots is a lot of fun. Many local libraries have genealogical materials and host genealogical societies. The Mormons have a huge database of church registers around the world. There are several geneological websites like Ancestry.com and tribalpages.com that have all kinds of resources. Discovering your ancestors can be fun. You may find you are related to famous people. Sometimes you find relatives you never knew and they have their own research on whole long branches of your family. 

Some of you kinfolk inevitably find some quirky relatives like my Great Great Grandfather Horatio Benjamin French, a circuit riding preacher who outlived five wives and baptized more than half the Adventists in Texas during the first 30 years of the 20th century. There was also his son Alonso, the special effects pioneer, who found him praying about the Second Coming in the hayloft one day and decided to create the effects of hell being kindled by lighting the haystack. 

Creative genes run in my family. 

The origins of Roots Day is shrouded in the mists of history, but, hey, what a nice thing to celebrate at Christmas time.  Tell your wife or loved one you are happy to have joined your family tree to hers and celebrate the cooling shade your life together has created with this free downloadable Roots Day card. 

For your card, just click on the caption below the picture of the family tree. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself. 

This is a top fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "portrait" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. This also flips the inside upside down from the outside when you print in portrait mode, so that, when you fold it over, the inside comes out right side up.  If you're confused, I encourage you to give it a try with a practice sheet.

© 2013 by Tom King