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What Should I do with Old Christmas Cards?

Tricia Christensen
Tricia Christensen
Tricia Christensen
Tricia Christensen

Christmas cards are wonderful to receive during the Christmas season, but the joy doesn’t have to end there. Many Christmas cards are well adapted for use in crafts, and some cards may be so beautiful, they can be framed for use during the next year.

If you have kids with idle hands, one can allow them to cut up Christmas cards one doesn’t want to keep. Alternately, they can use the designs to decorate their own books, or throughout the year for various cut and paste projects. If you have no children, you might want to ask teachers at a nearby school if they would like Christmas cards for craftwork in the classroom.

Cards can be reused in an assortment of crafts.
Cards can be reused in an assortment of crafts.

Christmas cards from one season can be used to make thoughtful presents for next year. For example, a beautifully drawn angel or snowman can be cut carefully out and laminated. Put a small string through it and you have an ornament for next year’s tree.

Children may also delight in cutting out scenes and making bookmarks. Alternately, pictures can be cut out and used to decorate next year’s wrapping tissue or plain wrapping paper. Christmas cards depicting small scenes make excellent gift tags for the next year, as well.

Old Christmas cards could be used for do-it-yourself gift cards.
Old Christmas cards could be used for do-it-yourself gift cards.

People who like to make sure to send out Christmas cards to everyone who sent them a card this year should save the envelopes. Envelopes with return addresses can be used to for reference when mailing out next year’s cards. One can also use the envelopes sometime during the year to type up a list of recipients for the next year’s Christmas cards.

People may make ornaments using old Christmas cards.
People may make ornaments using old Christmas cards.

With a computer labeling program, the workload of sending out Christmas cards is reduced. Instead of handwriting each address, one can simply print out a batch of labels for next year’s cards. Computer labeling, free of typos, is often much easier for the post office to handle, assuring cards will reach their intended destination.

Tricia Christensen
Tricia Christensen

Tricia has a Literature degree from Sonoma State University and has been a frequent WiseGEEK contributor for many years. She is especially passionate about reading and writing, although her other interests include medicine, art, film, history, politics, ethics, and religion. Tricia lives in Northern California and is currently working on her first novel.

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Tricia Christensen
Tricia Christensen

Tricia has a Literature degree from Sonoma State University and has been a frequent WiseGEEK contributor for many years. She is especially passionate about reading and writing, although her other interests include medicine, art, film, history, politics, ethics, and religion. Tricia lives in Northern California and is currently working on her first novel.

Learn more...

Discussion Comments

latte31

GreenWeaver-I like the idea of a memory box, but you can also make a Christmas card collage and take a picture of it.

This is something that your children can help you with and is a lot of fun. You simply get a poster board and cover the entire board with the front cover of the Christmas cards.

You can keep the collage or simply take a picture of it and either make an ornament out of the photograph to commemorate that year or keep it in an album.

You can then throw away the collage or keep it and put in your garage. This way every Christmas you can bring out the collage and use it as another Christmas decoration.

You can even start a tradition and do this every year. I know that there is some beautiful charity Christmas cards that I would feel guilty throwing away.

GreenWeaver

I like the idea of keeping the envelopes as a reference in order to build a mailing list for future mailings.

It does make it easier when sending Christmas greeting cards. I think that the actual cards can be kept in a scrapbook or a memory box to commemorate the year.

It can include pictures of Christmas events that year as well as Christmas Day events. This is especially memorable if you have children and want to look back on the year at a future date.

These works really well with photo Christmas cards that you just don’t know what to do with them. Here you can keep the picture Christmas cards in a nice labeled memory box and you don’t have to feel guilty about throwing the cards away.

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    • Cards can be reused in an assortment of crafts.
      By: cook_inspire
      Cards can be reused in an assortment of crafts.
    • Old Christmas cards could be used for do-it-yourself gift cards.
      By: 14ktgold
      Old Christmas cards could be used for do-it-yourself gift cards.
    • People may make ornaments using old Christmas cards.
      By: marilyn barbone
      People may make ornaments using old Christmas cards.