Along with doing some Secret Santa exchanges, I like to celebrate the holidays each year by sending out cards. I started doing this several years ago. At first, I was unsure about sending out cards since it seems like only people with kids were doing it. But I realized that it can be fun to send them out on my own as well. I have never done photo cards, but a few of my single friends have given me some inspiration for ideas in the future if I want to do photo cards. But for now, I’ve been sticking with non-photo cards.
Most years, I find pre-made cards and just buy enough for how many I’ll be sending out. When I didn’t have too many to send, regular cards with envelopes were fine with me. But as my holiday card list got bigger, sending out cards got a bit more expensive. So in recent years, I have switched to getting postcards since they are about half the price to mail. The selection of holiday postcards isn’t as great, but there are still a lot of options.
But this year, I wasn’t finding any that I liked that were in my budget. I knew I needed about 100 cards, and there were a lot that I loved that were about $15 for 10 cards. That’s just way too much for me. So I decided to make my own cards this year.
I took a little inspiration from some of the ones I liked when I was looking around but I wanted to change it up. Then I went into Canva to design it since I knew they would have the right dimensions for a postcard. Originally, I wasn’t planning on using one of their layouts, but I looked at them and found one that I liked that I could modify to be what I wanted. It was all pretty easy to put together. My original plan was to take the image and send it somewhere to print (like to an office supply store), but while I was doing some adjustments in Canva I noticed there was an option to order postcards directly from them. They weren’t too expensive, so I decided to go with them.
There was also an option to have them address and mail the postcards, but I wasn’t done getting updated addresses from everyone and finishing my list. So I had them shipped to me and I was going to make my own address labels and mail them myself. Maybe one year, I’ll have cards addressed and mailed for me, but it’s an extra cost so I’m not sure if the convenience is worth it yet.
I finally got my cards addressed and mailed and my friends should be getting them any day now. So I figure it’s safe to show what I made.
I feel like this ended up being the perfect card for this year. I did want it to look a bit cheery since it is a holiday card, but I didn’t want to pretend that this year was great. I had seen a lot of cards that were themed around this year being tough. And that seemed to be the right idea to represent my year and to put a little comedy in the cards.
Hopefully, all of my friends will like the card. I know how much I love getting fun things in the mail, which is one of the reasons I send cards out each year. But I also hope that this makes them smile a bit. It’s been so tough for everyone with everything going on. We want to look forward to next year, but it’s hard when we are still stuck in this year with all the struggles. But this card is a reminder that we should hopefully have a better 2021. This year is almost over and we are going to be going into a year that has a vaccine and maybe at some point next year it will be safe to start doing the things we all miss so much.
So suck it 2020! You were a horrible year. Yes, there were good moments, but overall it was awful. Good riddance to this year and here’s to what should be a better year ahead!
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