Holiday cards designed by Hank Azaria for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundations

With its canvas, seemingly of white construction paper and a color palette in line with your basic box of Crayola washable markers, a person could easily dismiss Hank Azaria’s holiday cards as horribly amateur for an adult celebrity. Please try to remember that while his resume includes 20 years of voicing cartoons like The Simpsons, it doesn’t list drawing them.

The holiday card that Azaria created for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has childlike simplicity. Multi-colored smiling faces and a scribbled heart with outpouring lines adorn the card and resemble another piece of charitable art from Christmases past, the LP album series, A Very Special Christmas. Azaria’s holiday card design is deliberate though, meant to evoke that most simple of times – childhood during the holiday season.

Children, as you might expect, aren’t well-known for giving lavish or extravagant gifts. Some celebutante, trust-fund babies might give outlandish gifts, but I digress. Instead, children only have a few things to give the people in their lives for the holidays. They give their imagination and talents…and they give simply from the heart. Could there be anything more heartwarming than something handmade from your child? The charming, almost-shy presentation to you is so endearingly filled with their hopes of you loving it after all their hard work… making it personalized just for you.

Hank Azaria

It should be no surprise that Hank Azaria’s holiday cards aren’t about something that doesn’t require assembly by an adult and isn’t a medium-sized pair of slipper-socks without a receipt. Hank Azaria’s holiday card is about something that’s simple and touching…the effortless and kind act of giving both genuinely and generously from the heart.

And although his heart and soul is forever in The Simpsons, Azaria’s live-action roles have been dotted throughout a typically animated career. I (like most people might) recall Hank Azaria’s face as Agador Spartacus in The Birdcage, but the voice-over actor has also been in several other comedic movies of note like the Ben Stiller vehicle, Dodgeball, and Grosse Pointe Blank.

And just as he leaves us smiling after watching him in one of his funny roles, children with HIV/AIDS and their families will be smiling from the help that he brings to them through the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Hank – keep up the good work!