For the past three years, instead of printing our family Christmas photos and sending them to our friends and family, I’ve made these goofy video cards using various consumer gen AI tools. As you can see, it’s not high effort - just something silly to do each year and it gives me a chance to play with the latest AI tools to make something real to me. Its not meant to replace physical cards, I just didnt want to invest the time, money and energy into physical cards these last three years and I’d rather learn something new in the process.

I had a lot of fun making these and learning along the way. My friends and family are pretty used to me. Maybe next year I’ll work on something more involved and personalized for them but I always wait until the last minute and its a miracle that I even get these out. I’m lucky we got professional pictures two out of the last three years (100 percent due to my wonderful partner). Very unlikly she is reading this blog post but if so, thank you for humoring these AI slop projects each year and I love you. She has been supportive of all my tech adventures always.

The Cards

What I Used to Make Our Cards:

Suno

For the music: this is by far my favorite tool of what I have listed here.

Listening back to the last three years— it’s fun to see the progress. It’s a great tool for making music from an idea. My three-year-old and I make songs and sing them a cappella and then cover them in various styles with Suno. The first time his eyes lit up when he recognized his lyrics and melody.

Adobe Express

Super fast to compose and add all the dorky animations and transitions I like. Right in the browser, which is great.

Descript

Descript has evolved quite a bit over the last three years, but I used it in the 2023 one for subtitles. It’s great for quick subtitles that can more or less keep up with the audio.

Pika

Pika is a fun video generation tool I used in the 2024 and 2025 cards. In 2025 it bugged out on me quite a bit and ate up credits - I haven’t looked deep into it but I think there may have been some errors and mistakes on their end. Still though my all in cost for the cards was under 20 dollars and this allowed me to play quite a bit with the tool and see what it could do.

I like that you can export to different sizes and the quality is passable for quirky family cards like this.

ChatGPT

I used it to help tweak an image to get to a frame with Pika. The superior choice for character consistency though is Ideogram, but I didn’t have time to dive into it much this year.

Looking Ahead to 2026

I have lots of ideas but I’ll likely just wait till the night before and scramble again. Leave your email and I’ll try to remember to send you the next one!

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