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Here are 40 uplifting Christmas posts to heal your soul before 2022. It’s that time of year. December has come and it’s brought all of its joys, including Christmas. But what is the meaning of this special holiday? Is it the gifts under the tree, the lights in the windows, or the cards in the mail?

Here is a beautiful list of the merriest moments that people have created for themselves and others.

Scroll below and enjoy yourself. All photos are linked and lead to the sources from which they were taken. Please feel free to explore further works of these photographers on their collections or their personal sites.

#1 The True Spirit Of Christmas, From Those Who Don’t Even Celebrate It

Image Source: Meet & Deep News

#2 My Husband Hated Christmas. But He Left Me This Year, So Now I’ve Got My First Proper Christmas Tree In 18 Years, And A New Rescue Kitty, So I’m Doing Alright

Image Source: pumpkinray

#3 An Elementary School Bus Driver Asked Every Kid On His Bus What They Wanted For Christmas. He Bought Every Child A Gift

Image Source: Lake Highlands Elementary

#4 My 11 Month Old Son Just Came Off His Ventilator This Morning Following A Ruptured Brain Aneurysm 12 Days Ago. He’s Going To Make It To His First Birthday On Christmas Eve

Image Source: Spudguy

#5 May I Present A Small Owl Sleeping In A Christmas Wreath

Image Source: lefties

#6 Every Christmas, Alice Cooper Serves Hundreds Of In-Need Children Free Meals At His Restaurant

Image Source: Unknown

#7 Way To Go To Save Trees

Image Source: smilegeorgee

#8 Been In My Bed Sick All Day. Finally Opened The Door And Arthur The Cat Had Brought Me A Christmas Ornament From The Tree As A Gift

Image Source: HelpfulPhotograph185

#9 I’m A 38-Year-Old Man Having My Best Christmas Ever Because I Finally Got A Baby Polar Bear. Say Hi To Nala

Image Source: imbignate

#10 Mom’s Getting Dementia And Cannot Bake Her Christmas Cookies Anymore

Image Source: Sekreid

#11 Meet Hiccup, We’ve Given Him A Home For Christmas

Image Source: AidenAsh15

#12 Our 1st Christmas Together And Our 12th Christmas Together

Image Source: _psa115_

#13 First Christmas Movie Together

Image Source: Big-Neck

#14 Have A Wholesome Christmas Everyone

Image Source: ImmobileLavishness

#15 This Year I Settled On The Biggest Tree I Could Find. Merry Christmas Everyone, Happy Holidays

Image Source: A-A-ron98

#16 Workmate Knows I’ve Been Finding The Last Few Months Very Tough Financially. Been Alone This Xmas And I’ve Only Known Him Six Months. Told Me There’s A Bag For Me

Image Source: d10x5

#17 I Was Sent This Just Before Christmas, This Is The First Time My Dad Has Stood Up Without Having Someone To Help Him Since The Amputation And I’m So Proud Of Him

Image Source: WelshOkie

#18 My Friend And I Replaced Christmas With Brucemas, Where We Exchange Bruce Willis Themed Gifts Each Year. I Win Forever. (And Yes It’s Real)

Image Source: TylentGreen

#19 A Group Of Mugs I Made For The Holidays

Image Source: tobtal

#20 Christmas Eve 2020

Image Source: ReverendMage

#21 My Cutie Girl Was Found About 6 Years Ago On The Side Of The Road On Christmas Day. She Has 3 Legs And Partial Blindness. Noelle Says Hello

Image Source: beckala215

#22 Needless To Say I Cried Like A Baby After Opening This On Christmas

Image Source: kshades12

#23 Every Year My Cat Forgets What A Christmas Tree Is And Re-Discovers The Wonder

Image Source: ImAnElkShootMe

#24 I Decided To Brighten Everyone’s Day During My Last Chemo Before Christmas At The Cancer Care Day Clinic

Image Source: RhoZie013

#25 We’ve Decorated My Prosthetics To Match The Christmas Feeling We Have. Happy Holidays!

Image Source: benhundben

#26 A Woman In Adelaide, Australia Came Home To Find A Koala In Her Christmas Tree

Image Source: cas2ie

#27 Me And My Girlfriend Got Each Other The Exact Same Gift For Christmas

Image Source: martinvarleite

#28 A Giant Christmas Sweater Was Created For The T-Rex At London’s Natural History Museum This Year

Image Source: dragon_lady

#29 It’s A Christmas Miracle! I Can Walk And Stand By The Tree

Image Source: miraclman31

#30 Our Christmas Card With Our Triplets This Year

Image Source: Wolfie305

#31 Insane Story. I Showed My Nard Dog Tattoo To The Old Lady Who Sat Behind Me At Work And Explained How Much I Love The Office. She Brought This In The Next Day And Gave It To Me

Image Source: hardcorechim

#32 My Mom Passed Away On Christmas Day. She Was The Cook In The Family. This Is The First Holiday Meal My Dad And I Made Without Her. We’re Going To Be Okay, Mom

Image Source: justme_343

#33 Christmas Day Is Also My Parent’s Wedding Anniversary, And This Is Their 42nd One. Happy Anniversary, Mr. And Mrs. Mathews

Image Source: saviokm

#34 My Mom Spent A Year Crocheting These Charlie Brown Dolls For Me For Christmas

Image Source: coolguyforeverr

#35 Both My Parents Passed Before My Daughter Was Born. My Wife Gave Me This Painting For Christmas

Image Source: DonOf952

#36 Belgrade’s University Children’s Hospital Is Off-Limits To Visitors Due To Covid Restrictions, But The Mountain Rescue Service Made Sure Kids Spending Christmas In Hospital Got Their Presents Anyway

Image Source: dob_bobbs

#37 My First Time Decorating The Tree By Myself. I Wanted To Make It Special This Year, Because My Mom Passed Away Suddenly In October. So, This Is In Memory Of Her

Image Source: Blubarries

#38 Ollie Next To The Painting He Got For Christmas

Image Source: Nordtorp95

#39 Neighbors Knew I Was Going To Be Alone For Christmas So They Brought Me This

Image Source: Stepoh

#40 Mike Sullivan And His Wife, Sierra, Have Been Married For Fifty Years. Ten Years Ago, They Built A Small Woodworking Shop In Their Home And Started Making Toys As A Hobby

Image Source: GlendaM94062232

(h/t: Boredpanda)

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Don’t miss to check these articles:

“A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China,” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, features 186 photographs and related artworks. (Ron Blunt/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

Urgent and edgy, “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China” fills most of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s second floor. With a spread like that, no single piece could possibly encapsulate the whole exhibition. Yet Sheng Qi’s “My Left Hand (Mother)” is exemplary of this show, featuring 186 photos and related artworks.

The color picture depicts the artist’s hand, missing its little finger and holding in its palm a small black-and-white photo of his mother. Before fleeing Beijing after the 1989 massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Sheng cut off the now-missing finger and buried it in a flowerpot he left behind. The photograph thus combines many attributes common to the exhibition’s works: It’s both conceptual and personal, was made in the spirit of protest, reflects family as well as national history, and documents a bodily performance.

Huang Yan’s “Chinese Landscape Series No. 3.” (Huang Yan)

Although Sheng’s photo stands alone here, it is in fact part of a series. That’s also typical of this show, whose artists often present repeated linked images. The massive piece that greets visitors as they step off the escalator is Song Dong’s “Stamping the River,” a set of 36 vertical pictures in which the artist repeatedly pressed a large wooden seal into Tibet’s Lhasa River to no effect. All that endures are the images documenting the action — and the sense of futility.

“A Window Suddenly Opens” contains work made between 1993 and 2022 but takes its impetus from the first of those three decades. That’s the period of the short-lived East Village, an artist’s colony that occupied an area of cheap migrant-worker housing on the outskirts of Beijing. A few years later came the brief run of New Photo, a magazine whose editorial statement in favor of conceptual photography is the source of the show’s title. One of the publication’s founders was Rong Rong, whose photos of East Village performances fill a large expanse of wall.

A photograph by Rong Rong, “East Village, Beijing,” documenting a 1994 performance, “Twelve Square Meters” by Zhang Huan. (Rong Rong)

The show comes entirely from the holdings of New York collector Larry Warsh, and 141 of the pieces have been promised to the Hirshhorn as a gift.

Sheng is not the only artist to include family snapshots in his work. Zhang Huan photographed himself with pictures of relatives in his open mouth and his face covered in foam. (Much like Song Dong’s river gestures, the foam represents ephemerality.) Song Yongping’s “My Parents (Passage 1-8)” traces the couple from vigorous youth during the Cultural Revolution to existing only as funerary portraits. Wang Jinsong reaches beyond his own clan for “Standard Family,” an array of 200 small and very similar photos. That each features a couple and a single offspring is an implicit critique of China’s one-child policy.

Several pictures employ artists’ bodies as canvases, originally a Western avant-garde idea but with embellishments rooted in Chinese culture. Zhang writes Chinese characters on his face until, over the course of nine photos, his skin becomes entirely black. In a set of four pictures, Huang Yan displays the traditional Chinese landscape his wife painted on his arms and torso. Cang Xin reveals only his tongue in a 54-picture series in which he tastes his roots by licking objects related to Chinese culture.

“Foam 9″ by Zhang Huan. (Zhang Huan)

Wang Qingsong’s “Requesting Buddha Series No. 1.” (Wang Qingsong)

Nudity, a challenge to China’s prescribed propriety, features in many of these photos. Cang’s “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” increases the peak’s height with a stack of prone naked bodies. Sixteen black-and-white pictures chart Ma Liuming’s progress as he walks the Great Wall in the nude. There’s also abundant bare skin in the 21st-century work of Wang Qingsong, who uses computer software to stitch photographic images together in horizontal compositions. These emulate traditional Chinese scroll paintings, but with many poses derived from noted European masterworks.

There are a few non-photographic entries by Lin Tianmiao, but they’re all connected to photos. Her three-dimensional fabric pieces follow the outlines of photographs, and her twine-wrapped bicycles appear both as objects and as props in scroll-like photo montages in a format akin to Wang Qingsong’s pictures.

Installation view of “A Window Suddenly Opens,” featuring twine-wrapped bicycles by Lin Tianmiao. (Ron Blunt/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

Considering how many of the artists produce multiples in sequence, it’s surprising that the show includes only two videos. One is a canine-themed performance piece with office workers in dogface makeup; the other is a computer-generated sci-fi cycle inspired by Buddhist notions of reincarnation.

Most of the show’s participants maintain the traditional idea of a single photograph as a moment of truth, even if that moment is staged rather than serendipitous. But truth is problematic in a totalitarian country that rules by propaganda and indoctrination as well as force. So these artists use subjectivity and theatricality to pry open a window through which viewers can glimpse, however fleetingly, stories that contradict the official narrative.

If you go

A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and Seventh Street SW. hirshhorn.si.edu.

Dates: Through Jan. 7, 2024.

Prices: Free.

If you’re looking to make your photography stand out it’s time to get creative with light. The longer I’ve been a photographer, the more I’ve come to appreciate good light. Good light makes my job so much easier, but interesting light makes my job more creative.

I love nothing more than when an image comes together with great composition, interesting light, and an engaging subject or storyline. What I’ve come to learn is that images don’t always just come together, we as the photographers have to focus on putting them together. And as we’re inundated with photography at every turn, it’s more important than ever to find ways for our photography to stand out.

In this article, we’ll walk through the importance of understanding light and then familiarize ourselves with lighting techniques. From there we’ll discuss how to work with what we have while also knowing how and when to add light. To come up with new and creative ideas, we first need an understanding of the tools and techniques at our disposal.

Understanding Light

Before we talk about lighting techniques, we have to understand the light that’s around us. Then we’ll be able to better utilize it or create it. This means understanding things like color, angle, intensity, and quality.

As you start to practice seeing light, you’ll start to notice it has a color temperature from warm yellowish light to cool blueish. Light also generally has an angle and direction such as coming in from right above your subject versus a more attractive 45-degree angle that doesn’t create eye socket shadows. The intensity of the light is also an important factor as there is definitely such a thing as too much or too little light.

Next, you’ll notice the quality of light and whether it’s hard or soft light. The quality of light is often dependent on the distance of the light source and how diffused it is. The more you practice seeing how light works the more prepared you will be when to start to try to use it or create it.

Here are some lighting terms you should know:

1. Color: The color of light in photography depends on the light source. Color temperature refers to the warmth or coolness of the light.
2. Hardness: In photography, light has a level of hardness from a hard focused light or soft diffused light often based on the size and distance of the light source.
3. Intensity: Intensity in photography is the measurement of how bright the light is.
4. Angle: In photography, light has an angle or direction that can create different effects or impact on the subject.

Familiarize Yourself With Lighting Techniques

There are a variety of natural lighting techniques, meaning ways to use the light that exists. On the simple end of the spectrum, you can control the light by deciding what time of day to photograph your subject. The color temperature, intensity, quality, and angle of light are all different in the early morning than they are in mid-day.

Unless the sun is directly overhead, you can control the direction of light by changing the direction you’re shooting. Put the sun behind your subject for a backlight effect, in front for frontlight, or to the side for sidelight. You can also move into open shade or use modifiers to alter the quality of light by diffusing it.

There are also artificial lighting techniques that photographers utilize. You may have heard terms such as catchlight, key light, fill light, and backlight. The key light is the primary light source, catch light is the highlights you see in a subject’s eyes, and back and fill light are just like they sound. From there, studio photographers use different lighting patterns to create different effects, some terms you might familiarize yourself with are: butterfly, clamshell, split, loop, Rembrandt, and rim lighting.

Work With What You Have

The first task, as I alluded to above, is to learn to utilize the light that you have in a variety of ways. Practicing shooting different angles and noticing the different effects it has. Play with finding soft light such as window light but also consider when there might be a good time to utilize hard light.

Spend some time considering how the quality, color, intensity, or angle of light tell a story or create a certain ambiance. With the same scene, you can create entirely different pictures by changing how you’re using the light. You might even consider including some ambient light from the background.

To get more creative, draw on different industries. For example, how do interior designers use light? Think of tasks lights on a nightstand that aren’t the main subject but add to the overall look and feel of the scene, how can you include more light to tell more of a story?

Know When to Add Light and Do It With Purpose

At some point, you’ll want to create more effects than what’s available to you naturally in the moment. At that point, you will want to familiarize yourself with various artificial lighting techniques. More importantly, you’ll want to know when you would want to use one technique over another.

You might simply add light to make your subject stand out, use modifiers to change the quality of light, or add in additional light sources. You might use a backlight to light up steam from a coffee or incorporate some ambient lighting like Christmas lights in the background. Using gels or adding colored light can tell a story by changing the color.

Finally, we need to remember how the whole picture fits together. How does your lighting choice connect with your composition? Maybe you’re using lighting as part of a pattern to create leading lines, a contrast of color, or to make your foreground or background more dynamic.

Creative Lighting Tips in Review

Hopefully walking through the steps above gave you some new ideas for how to see, use, or create light in your photography. Let’s review some of the tips and pick something to try. What else would you add to this list, how can you combine what you know to come up with something new and creative?

Utilizing light well in your photographs will make them stand out as consistent, interesting, thoughtful, or creative. You don’t always have to do something far outside of the box to make a big impact. Sometimes it’s just about being intentional and purposeful.

1. Understand light: color, intensity, quality, and direction.
2. Plan for the type of light you want based on weather, location, or time of day.
3. Practice creating different lighting effects from the same scene by changing the angle or diffusing the light.
4. Draw inspiration from other industries and specialties.
5. Decide when and why to add light.
6. Utilize light modifiers for different effects.
7. Use different artificial lighting techniques for different purposes.
8. Add additional lights for ambiance or secondary effects.
9. Consider using light in combination with your composition techniques.
10. Play with the color, intensity, quality, and direction in a variety of different combinations.

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About the author: Brenda Bergreen is a Colorado wedding photographer, videographer, yoga teacher, and writer who works alongside her husband at Bergreen Photography. With their mission and mantra “love. adventurously.” they are dedicated to telling adventurous stories in beautiful places.