Do you find yourself producing more visuals than usual during Advent? Is your church producing slide presentations, bulletins, flyers advertising a Christmas program, and the like? Are you sending out Christmas cards and letters? Do you ever find yourself looking for unique Christmas images to include in all these documents and presentations?
You can do a Google image search and find some nice images, but it can be a lot of work separating the wheat from the chaff. When you do manage to find the perfect image, it is often too small and low-resolution to be usable.
For that reason, I have long relied on Accordance resources like Bible Art for high-quality Christmas images. If you were to look back at my family Christmas letters over the past several years, you would see them adorned with quite a few images from that one module. Last year we added the Christmas Classics module with some additional Christmas images. And of course, an image search of your entire Accordance library can turn up additional images in unexpected places.
One relatively new resource which I plan to mine for images in upcoming years is Historic Views of the Holy Land: The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection. This massive collection of photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers views of Israel that you just don’t see today, and many of those photographs actually reenact biblical scenes. For example, a simple search for Bethlehem turned up the following images reminiscent of the shepherds:
…and the magi:
…and the birth of Jesus:
How cool are those? There are many more images which illustrate the Christmas story, and countless others which illustrate other biblical narratives. It’s really an incredible resource.
If you’re looking for unique and high-quality images to adorn your various projects this Advent, you’ll find Bible Art, Christmas Classics, and especially the Historic Views of the Holy Land collection extremely helpful.