Growing up, I remembered my family getting so many holiday cards from friends and family. They were always displayed in the living room and I loved looking at the photos that we got from everyone. Some people also sent letters, but I usually just loved looking at all the cards and photos. And of course, my parents sent out cards too. Even though I don’t live at home, I’m still included in the family holiday card (and they send one to me so I can see what they did).
For most of my 20s, I didn’t really get holiday cards from anyone. I think most people think of them as something you do when you have kids. But once I was in my 30s and started to get a few more cards from friends, I realized that they can come from anyone whether it’s from a family or just someone on their own. So I started to send out cards to others.
As the years have gone on, my holiday card list has gotten longer and I’ve been getting more and more cards from others as well. And I still love looking at the cards and the photos of my friends and their families. And now, I have a nice place in my entryway where I can display all the cards that I’ve gotten from people.
Even though most of the cards that I get from people are photo cards, I’ve never done that myself. I started getting cards that I could buy at the store or online because that’s the easiest way to do this. Then, once my holiday card list got longer, I realized doing postcards was a bit more cost-effective. Plus, since I’m not putting a photo on there, it didn’t feel as weird not having an envelope. And there were some cute postcards that I found online that I could buy, but a few years ago I realized I couldn’t find what I wanted and it would just be easier if I could make something myself.
So for the last few years, I’ve made my own postcards to send out for the holidays. They are nothing fancy and I use a template from Canva so I’m not custom-designing them, but I am able to change things up a bit to make them work for me. For example, last year’s card was not only a holiday card but also had my new address on it so I didn’t have to worry that people might mail things to the wrong place. But this year I didn’t do anything too crazy or fancy, I just did a simple design that I found and changed a bit to fit what I would want to send out.
I had gotten a bit stressed when I realized how soon the end of the year when I hadn’t gotten everything done, but the good thing about sending cards that say Happy New Year is that they can arrive a bit after the 1st and it’s still ok. But even if they were just regular holiday cards, I never mind getting them late so I would assume most of my friends feel the same way.
I got them printed through Vista Print, so it wasn’t too expensive to do that. I think between the printing and the stamps, I spent less than $50 to send them all out. That’s not bad considering how many I send and how happy it makes me to do something silly like this. And it didn’t take that long to do this either. I think the longest parts were waiting for the printed postcards to arrive and the line at the post office when I went to get postcard stamps. But once I had everything I needed, it was pretty quick to put all the postcards together so I could mail them out.
I know how much I appreciate not only getting holiday cards but anything in the mail that isn’t a bill or junk. Having something nice in the mail is a rare treat, so if I can make someone smile a bit by getting a postcard from me, that’s awesome!
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