I’d had the idea of a snowball fight written on a scrap of paper for a couple of years but never settled on how to make it happen as a Christmas Card. Finally this year I was inspired by the classic, complicated pull-tab work done by the great and powerful Lothar Meggendorfer. The whole mini narrative unfolds chronologically as the tab is pulled to the right and the action resets as the tab is pushed back to the left. I was really happy with the way this one came out but afterwards I realized that to the uninformed, it might seem simple to make. I assure you that this thing has some very complicated engineering inside. But a couple of people told me that they were glad that I “took it easy on myself” this year and didn’t do a pop-up. I guess the job of a magician is to make it look easy but I was surprised that a couple of people didn’t imagine the inside of this thing looking like the elaborate clockworks that it is. I guess most people see all the gracefully engineered folding in a normal, dimensional pop-up but the pull-tab works have all of the beauty of the mechanism intentionally hidden inside to help deliver the surprise when the tab is pulled. I still like this card a lot and I remember my old boss telling me that it was his favorite card up to that point. Also, my wife seemed to enjoy repeatedly smacking me in the head with a snowball – a little too much.
This was my first Christmas card from you! I will treasure it always.