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Re-Thinking Our Christmas Cards

Christmas cards~sending them and receiving them~are one of my favorite things about the holidays. I started sending them to friends and family when I was just about six years old (I've always been an avid letter writer, so I always had pen-pals).

I love the whole process of Christmas cards: choosing the card(s), making my list, addressing the envelopes, putting on the holiday stamps, dropping those huge stacks of cards into the mailbox. It's all so much fun to me!

In the early years of our marriage I discovered how to stamp my own cards, using rubber stamps and ink. That started a whole new Christmas card process for me. The first year that I stamped our cards I did a 3-stamp-multiple-color-plus-ribbon process on over 100 cards. Yeah, a little too ambitious, but they turned out great!:)

(front cover)
(inside)

The next year I wasn't nearly as crazy. I still stamped over 100, but I kept it to a 2-stamp-1-color process.

(front cover)
(inside)

The following year I think I stamped about a dozen and bought the rest.


For The Princess' first Christmas I made about a dozen cards--bought the rest--but I slapped a picture on the front and only stamped on the inside. (Are you seeing the downward progression here? haha)

(front cover)
(inside)

I didn't do a handmade card at all for a couple of years, then The Princess drew the cutest family picture one day and we decided to make that the front of our card (we used an online printing company). It was adorable!

And that was the end of our handmade cards...so far.

This year I'm re-thinking our Christmas cards entirely. Lately it's been a store-bought card with a family pic, maybe a family letter every other year or so. But have you noticed how expensive stamps are getting? We are really making a concerted effort this year to scale way back on holiday spending. It makes me a little sad, because like I said before, I adore sending Christmas cards.


However, we are going mostly digital this time around. In this age of blogging and Facebook~and, yes, even the *ancient* email~we are in touch with nearly every one of our friends and family by internet. So this year we plan to utilize these means to share Christmas tidings with everyone. I'm looking forward to creating our digital card to post and send.

I am planning to stamp a few special cards, too. Those should be fun because there will just be a few and I can be as elaborate or as simple as I want to be.


How about you? Do you enjoy sending cards? What kind do you like to send?

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