Mini Grey

#25CardofChristmas2025
Here they all are - the last 25 years in Christmas cards. Wishing you all good cheer!

#25CardsofChristmas2025
And so we come to 2025. I've always loved the Looking Glass Insects in Alice, particularly the Rocking Horse Fly. I couldn't make one of those, so here is a flying rocking horse.
Merry Christmas one and all!

#25CardsofChristmas2025
We have reached last year! In October 2024 I made an alphabestiary of animals I'd sketched in Natural History museums. The raven was seen at Wollaton Hall. Is a Poe Raven a Christmassy thing? We don't know.

I was quite proud of getting her tail into it, as the Hoffmann's Cat doesn't have one that sticks out. Here's the original Hoffmann's cat, and Pepper modelling for it.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
In 2023 I went to a tabletop museum thing and came across a Hoffmann's ReisStarke Cat - little cut-out cat - and thought - I'll steal that. My cat Pepper is extremely enthusiastic about Food, so here's Pepper the Hungry Cat.

So it was a bitter irony that in 2022 Quality Street ditched the foils and films and dressed their chocs in 'sustainable' waxy ugly wrappers. The magic, and a Christmas tradition, was gone.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
2022's card was all about cheese and chocolate. The chocolates were Quality Streets - one of the most important Xmas things to me as a child - squirrelling away the jewel-like foils and films and then making them into new things. I have been known to hang them on the tree.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
It's 2021 and I'd been drawing Puss in Boots for fun, so this cat and mice card happened with a panto theme.
I just wouldn't trust that cat, you mice...

#25CardsofChristmas2025
And we reach 2020, when we were all locked down. Who could escape this grim isolation for more exotic climes?
B. Bird could, complete with openable suitcase for all the holiday essentials: sunglasses, towel, mixed seeds, holiday reading by Thomas Hardly...

Asking for a climate income to tackle climate change. | Citizens' Climate Lobby UK Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a non-profit, non-partisan, grassroots advocacy organisation focused on policies to address climate change.

All we need is more wildlife and less CO2.

PS: One way to reduce carbon emissions here: citizensclimatelobby.uk

Asking for a climate income to tackle climate change. | Citizens' Climate Lobby UK Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a non-profit, non-partisan, grassroots advocacy organisation focused on policies to address climate change.

So 2018's card is a planet present, that opens up to show a Slight Accident, from the People of 2018.
Whoops.
But then the inside layer opens to show an underlayer: Of course we didn't do that - you'd have to be NUTS to break your only home - from the People of 2019.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
Here we are in 2018, and I was a bit worried about the state of our planet: there was increasing carbon dioxide and decreasing nature. Maybe good to think about the Earthlings of 2050, and the planet we'll pass on to them.

Caption: Every December, the team of marine biologists draw lots to decide who will take Mister Wiggles home with them for the holidays. Image: Five small figures take small pieces of paper from a hat. Behind them a colossal squid waits in an enormous tank set upon a gigantic trolley.

A Christmas cartoon from my new book of science cartoons PHYSICS FOR CATS. In good bookshops and online now: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth

In 2017 I’d been doing imagery for the children’s audiology department at the JR Hospital in Oxford, and my birds are borrowed from there. #ReduceReuseRecycle

#25CardsofChristmas2025
It’s 2017 and I’m keeping things simple by making another zig-zag card. This time it’s from the birds. They’re very disgruntled at having to wear Christmassy scarves and they’ve been promised bird seed and it hasn’t arrived.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
In 2016 I was thinking about joining the humanists, then realised how human-centric it was.
What could you join if you were a reptile or a fish? So I joined The RestoftheWorldists.
Because the Rest of the World can't talk, but someone needs to give them a voice.

The wings were cut with a Pazzle Inspiration Suicidal Cutter that we got third hand which kept trying to eat the wings instead of cut them.

At the bottom is part of Gillray's cartoon of The Plumb-Pudding in Danger.

Now you can have your world, eat it too - and hang it on your tree.

There was a lot of chocolate coin testing to find ones that were slim enough - but it was Sainsbury's coins that could squeeze through my thickness-tester with enough room.

And so here is the Souvenir of Earth Planetary Bauble. (The chocolate coin lurks under the cut-out Earth.)

#25CardsofChristmas2025
We're at 2015 today. I had a longing to send a chocolate coin somehow as a card, for, to me, chocolate coins scream Christmas. But I was mindful of 2012's postal disaster with the impounded matchbox cards. I had to keep the card to a strict 5mm thickness.

Eventually I realised less in more, and all you need for picture book magic is your reader’s imagination and maybe an unexpectedly-shaped page. The Brenda Cabinet of Mystery never got into the book, but it managed to be a card. Here’s Brenda disappearing and reappearing.

I thought this could be an excuse for some crazy paper engineering, so the first sketch model book of the Bad Bunnies had things like woven panel dissolves in it.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
2014: The Cabinet of Mystery
This card I’d accidentally made when messing around with my book The Bad Bunnies Magic Show. The Bad Bunnies have locked their magician the Great Hypno in a trunk and are attempting his tricks and unleashing unexpected transformations.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
In 2013 I’d been running an after-school club in pop-up at my son’s primary school. This card happened after we’d looked at angle folds, & I found out you could use the power of a tiny fold to make wings beat. Everyone needs one….a pocket Fairy Godmother

Yes, it was but matchbox-sized and fitted in a teeny envelope, but it was 2 ½ cm deep, and this means it was ACTUALLY a Large Letter. So most of the pocket planets were impounded in Royal Mail depots and the unlucky recipients had to go and pay at least £1.70 to release their miniscule item.

With instructions on the back for what to add to make your habitable planet (then simply wait for 4 ½ billion years and – Hey Presto!) Now, dear reader, this card was a painful lesson about Royal mail Postage prices.

#25CardsofChristmas2025
It's 2012 and I'm wondering: could I make a Christmas card that was also a matchbox? And what would you put in a matchbox? What about a spare Pocket Planet, just in case of a planetary emergency.

Aha!

#25CardsofChristmas2025
It's 2011, & we have the chance to check in with how Christmas is going for the insects.Uncle Fly is wrestling with sellotape,the young ants are playing charades,in the attic the little maggots are looking in their stockings. Just a bit worried about what Mrs Weevil is up to…

#25CardsofChrstmas2025 In ThreeByTheSea, Cat Dog&Mouse are given packets of herbs by a passing foxy stranger. This card includes a packet of herb seeds to grow your own stuffing. The seeds were a bit random - everything I could find in the garden shed. There were mixed reports about what came up.