I have been getting a lot of questions about an Instagram story I posted a couple weeks ago about what I do with all of the Christmas cards that we receive. I wrote this blog post 5 years ago and figured it might be a good time to repost it.
Don’t throw out all those cards, easily turn them into little photo books that you can pull out each year! We now have 9 years of books collected and I love to pull out the books in late November and look through them the entire month of December.
One of my favorite parts about Christmas is receiving the cards from all of our friends and relatives. I especially like the photos.
They make me smile from the day I receive my first card until the day I finally take them down from their display…which is usually one of the last things to come down.
Over the years I have saved the photos in a drawer in my desk. You see, my aunt had albums full of christmas card photos and every year I loved to sit down on Christmas day and look through them. Although I didn’t know all the people, I learned to recognize the familiar faces year after year and enjoyed seeing how families had grown, adult children had gotten married, etc. My plan was to eventually start some albums of my own.
As I was trying to find space in the drawer in my desk for our cards from Christmas 2012 I finally decided to just put the darn books together. I mean, for goodness sake, all I needed was a hole punch (I used a 3 hole punch and a single hole punch), some chipboard, some rings, and a glue stick!
All of my cards were organized by year, so I started punching holes.
{That’s my mom and dad in Italy}
I used two holes of a three hole punch so that I would eventually be able to line up the cards that were differing sizes and shapes.
Then I cut some chipboard that I had from the back of some thrifted frames that I won’t be using. I cut the chipboard a little larger than the largest card…three of the books ended up being 9″ x 6″ and one is 8″ x 6″.
I punched holes in the chipboard and glued our christmas card to the front.
I also made back covers for the books so the cards are protected on both sides of the book.
This year our card was a post card and I wanted to include the back of the card, so I put it on the inside of the back cover.
In less than an hour (it actually took 2 days, but I had to start and stop multiple times for various reasons…kids, dogs, cats, husbands, etc.) I had books from the last 4 years put together!
For now, they are in our basket of photo books in the family room. I think, eventually, I will put them in the attic with the rest of the Christmas decor so they will be a fun tradition to pull out of the bins each year.
Notice a change to the bookshelves? I’ll fill you in on that quick project this week!
Stay tuned…
I hope this inspires you to keep those cards! It’s a super simple project and feels so good once you have it done!
stephany taddeo 