Decorating with Photos: What do I do with all those Christmas cards? Especially the ones with photos?

Now that the Christmas season is winding down, are you wondering what to do with all those Christmas cards?

Here are three suggestions:

#1 – Take them down.  Crop them.  Add them to a photo album with the year noted.

My mom does this, and when I go to visit her, I can pick up an annual album and see photos of cousins, neighbors, and friends and how they’ve changed over the years.

Becky Higgins has a great tutorial on her site on how to make this work for you.

#2 – Make them into placemats and coasters.  WikiHow has a great tutorial on this.

My husband and I arrived at a friend’s house for Sunday lunch, and when her 6-year old set the table, he pulled out place mats that had all the past year’s Christmas cards on it.  I LOVED IT!  A bit of construction paper, some creative placement of 2 or 3 cards on each piece, lamination paper, and voila!  We, along with their other friends and family, were preserved behind that lamination paper.  (The laminating paper helped with quick clean up post-dinner, as well.)

#3 – When I was meeting with a client this summer, she had this stack on her mantle.

What will you do to re-use and recycle your Christmas cards?

A hole-punched through each photo card, a ring to hold them all together, and this becomes a piece of history that lives on in our homes.

From year to year, we can see how the children in our lives grow and how everyone changes.  This living piece of history is our history…shown annually in the holiday cards we send and receive.