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Just spent my birthday, it is once again time to put my pens at work for Christmas cards. To have some hope that they could reach their destination on time, I'll have to put them in the mail before the weekend, so ... hand at work! The Christmas tree, which will go on the front of the card, is taken up from a process that experienced a great vogue at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in northern Europe. It was a type of decoration that became known as decoupage, from the French word decouper, cut, since it is performed, in fact, cutting out the figures with scissors to obtain a kind of lace. The technique was widely used and it was also employed as an economical way to produce small portraits, in silhouette form, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century. The silhouettes theater, derived from the Chinese "theater of shadows", was successful in France in the last quarter of the Enlightenment, until landing at the Palais Royale in 1784. I drew the decoupage profile with the lovely, really extra-fine nib, of my Omas New Paragon, using the ink that I have chosen as the most suitable for this pen, the Diamine "Anniversary Collection" Terracotta color. Then I filled in the blanks with a number 0 brush and with extra-fine nib (but a bit largest) of my Hemingway, dipped in Montblanc Hitchcock: it is the more "Christmas-red" ink that I know! For the back page I designed, with the Hemingway and Montblanc Toffee Brown ink, a Christmas wreath. The word "Christmas 2016" is made with a Lamy Al-Star fitted with a 1.1 mm nib, using the Lamy Copper Orange ink in cartridges. Finally, for the page that will be the inner right, I wrote the card with the Lamy 1.9 mm nib that my dear daughter Carlotta gave me last September, loading the pen converter with Hitchcock ink. I printed, with our home inkjet, some proofs of the card, on thin laid paper. In the coming days, however, I will have some twenty cards professionally printed on a better and heavier paper. The 7 x 5" envelopes, which I find locally, are produced in El Salvador by a company called Mivisa. They are of a beautiful ivory color paper, smooth but not too much, really perfect for the fountain pen. I wrote the names of the recipients with the Lamy 1.1 and 1.9 nibs, and the addresses with the medium italic nib of my Montblanc Dumas, loaded with Montblanc Royal Blue.