Christmas Cards

Every year I have a love/hate/love relationship with Christmas cards. I love to get them in the mail, but I kind of hate the process of making my own, but then I love the finished product and giving them to people. But still, it is an all day task. I have to look through our photos and decide which ones make the cut. I have to decide if we go for one family shot, or some individual shots. Usually I try to do both because a family shot rarely has the best of each person. Then I need to find a card that has enough space for all of those pictures I want to use. Additionally, there is the newsletter. Last year we wrote a letter that accompanied our card, which was a great way to share the eventful year we had, but a lot of work. So as I was pondering our choices, and even if we would send a card this year, I flipped through a brochure that I got in the mail from Shutterfly. It seemed that they had a lot of options and cute designs that I hadn't seen in other cards. I liked this one because it lets you use 6 pictures, which would be perfect for our family, to share one good picture of each person, and then a group shot. In fact, they have a lot of multi-picture cards.

They also have many cards that have a more religious tone, which I appreciate, but am not always able to use because there usually aren't enough photo spaces, but this one actually does have plenty of photos.

And here is one that I really like because of the design and the message.

But the one that I ended up choosing* was exactly what I was looking for. It had both plenty of picture spaces, and a "Top 10" portion of the card that we could fill in(here it is a generic list, but in real life it has actual events). It would cut out writing the Christmas newsletter, but still give our far-away friends and family an update on our lives.

After I am done designing and sending out our card, I think I will take some time to make a photo book of our summer vacation this past year, and a calendar for next year.



*Even though I loved the design, I wasn't sure I was going to purchase them, but once I saw their offer for 50 free cards in return for a blog post (heavy with links), I decided to go for it. I am super-excited that I can send out the card I wanted all along.

Also, so, so, sorry to all of you who sign up for my blog via a reader. I didn't know how to imbed the pictures of the cards into my post, so I had to have shutterfly send them and create a brand new post each time. Then I deleted them, but they still show up on the reader. So embarrassing!