Today's post is from guest blogger Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, and the creator, with Teleflora, of the Thomas Kinkade Sleigh Ride Bouquet, one of our gorgeous Christmas flower arrangements.
The floral experts at Teleflora are amazing—every year, we work closely with their designers and creative team to come up with a keepsake arrangement that is very special and memorable. It’s a pleasure talking about holiday flowers and Christmas centerpieces with the people at Teleflora—they know Christmas flowers inside and out.
We communicate back and forth regularly with the Teleflora team to make sure that the end product is something unique and perfect down to each tiny detail. We discuss everything from the overall assortment of colors to the featured shapes and form of the arrangement.
The entire Thomas Kinkade family is very excited about this year’s Sleigh Ride Keepsake Bouquet. The flowers incorporated into the keepsake this year are stunning. Working extensively with the artists at Teleflora, coupled with our ideas, the team has created a keepsake that truly illustrates this wonderful time of year. We couldn’t be happier with this amazing keepsake!
I’ve always loved incorporating sleighs in my Christmas images. One of my most well-known sleigh paintings is Moonlit Sleigh Ride. I came up with the concept for this painting one night after a cross-country skiing trip through a snowy valley by moonlight.
At that moment, I decided to paint a tribute to this romantic adventure, with the exception of the skis. Instead, a nostalgic sleigh whisks through the moonlit forest in this painting. What could be nicer than returning to the inviting glow of a warm fireplace after a frosty evening sleigh ride?
Another one of my popular sleigh images is called Sunday Evening Sleigh Ride. Snow is a wonderful mirror for moonlight, bathing the landscape in a soft silver glow. In this painting, I have featured a church built on a hillside, where it becomes a beacon of hope for its village; worshipers arrive in a swift, cozy horse-drawn sleigh. The moonlight casts dramatic shadows and under its spell, the lamps in the valley below twinkle with a special radiance.
The image that inspired this year’s Sleigh Ride Keepsake Bouquet is called Christmas Chapel I, a painting that also includes a sleigh in the scene. Sleighs are an important part of my holiday season and the memories of the jingling bells as we glide across the snow. So I will always try place a sleigh in my Christmas images, whenever I can. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do – they really seem to say “Merry Christmas” – don’t you agree?
