No two alike

So I've been noticing what a wealth of Christmas cheer that Flickr can be! There are photos for every possible combination of Christmas words (What tipped me off was a fruitful search for "reindeer inspection" ... more on that later).

In case you were looking for it, there is a Flickr group for vintage Christmas decoration catalogs (and also for vintage holiday collectibles and vintage holiday advertising). But what really caught my eye were black & white Christmas-y images.

The Smithsonian has a winter wonderland set that is really rather wonder-ful, including these lovely shots of snowflakes.

Check out this description that the Smithsonian posted with each photo:

Wilson A. Bentley first became fascinated with snow during his childhood on a Vermont farm, and he experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines.

That's a little awesome, right?

So I thought I was going to be slightly creative and now suggest you use these as inspiration the classic craft-your-own-snowflake activity. But it turns out the Smithsonian beat me to it!

A staff member in the Smithsonian Institution Archives created templates of these snowflakes in case you want to print them out and cut them exactly (kinda wish the templates were of the fold-and-cut sort, but we can't be choosers now can we?). Turns out someone else created digital brushes for using in Photoshop and the like using the snowflake images too.