Many artists, designers, photographers and other creative workers make their own Christmas cards for private use in which their investigations of self, gender, the body, death and the sacred may be seen in concentrated form. Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was a key member of the Pan-African Connection and its successor, the Blk Art Group. This group was central to early debates around the theories and practices which helped to shape the emergence of an identifiable Black British art movement in the 1980s. Shot through with ambiguity, Rodney's work, while commenting - sometimes polemically - on the ethnic specificity of the sickle-cell anaemia from which he suffered, eschewed the obvious tactic of presenting himself as a cipher for the disease, or the disease itself as a metaphor for the political condition of being black in Britain.