Christmas Cards

So I LOVE Christmas cards! L-o-v-e them. As a kid I remember coming home from school and scouring the kitchen table to see if we'd gotten any that day while I was gone. Seriously. Love them.

I love hearing what people are up to, seeing the cute photos of their families; throw in some creative writing (writing from their pet's perspective, making what they've done this year into a puzzle, rhyming each line...LOVE!) and I'm in heaven.

I also fall into the group of people who believe that if you want Christmas cards, you'd better send them out! So we do. As a kid I helped my Mom do it, in high school I wrote cards to each of my friends, which I continued in college. And, of course, when the Spouse and I got married the tradition grew even stronger....

Of course, the trick gets to be paying for the cards (and their postage...yikes!). So, what is a girl to do? As with most things there are 100 ways to skin a cat, but here's how I did it.

First, I attacked the issue of postage. Clearly the year I sent Christmas CDs in the cards jacked the shipping to astronomical heights....$1.50 x 200 cards...I thought I was going to faint. SO, what's the exact opposite? Postcards. $.29 per card. Perfect.

But, how to do it so you get the photo and the text that you desire? Again, many different ways to do it, but I utilized a few online resources: Picnik and Vistaprint

What I did was took a regular photo of our family to Picnik. (This was taken one random day when we were out and about; we hadn't planned on this being our card photo or we would have gone for matching outfits...or even pulled a comb through the kids' hair! Alas, we loved the scenery and everyone was looking the right direction...we went with the "close enough" thought this year! I did, however, clone-out the guy who was playing in the falls behind us!)












I utilized "stickers" and "text" to add the wording (forgive the blue box; that was where our names are...I do try to keep some of our information private for safety).














I saved the file to my computer and then went over to Vistaprint...I linked to them from an ad on my blog...I'm sure you've seen their little ad buttons all over the place; if not, you can sign up to get "deals" from them at their website. I picked an ad that was offering 100 free postcards.

I picked a blank postcard template, uploaded our photo, then added our Christmas letter to the back. When I checked out I had to pay shipping, but that was it. It cost $10.36 for 100. Of course, I needed 200...so I went back and did the entire process again. $20 for 200 cards....$.10 per card! I would say the only draw back is that the standard sized postcards made it so that I had to go with size 8 font on the back which is REALLY small. :( If we had fewer kids or less to tell I could have made it larger, but I had already cut a lot from the letter so I just left it. Hopefully our older friends/relatives will have a magnifying glass handy so they can read it...yikes!

So, my grand total for doing our Christmas cards this year will be $78...$.39 per card. Perhaps I'll buy, as my sister-in-law did, a bottle of wine for myself with the savings. Aw...who am I kidding? I'm totally buying craft stuff! ;)

Have a great day,
Stacy