Christmas cards.

Last year I read on Ali Edwards' blog about a great project she does with her Christmas cards every year. So I set mine aside. Of course, I never actually got around to doing anything about it. Until now! :) So starting with all the cards we received this year, I used a 2" square punch to punch out designs from card fronts, photo cards, and Christmas letters, and then mounted them on a sheet of 8x8" cardstock. I chose to use this smaller size because we don't get a ton of Christmas cards each year (Ali's is 12x12"). I also filled in some empty spaces with the signatures from the insides of cards. I added the year with some glitter chipboard number stickers.

I went back as far as I could, making a page for each year. I ended up with a page for each year from 2006-2010, and one page that uses bits and pieces from 2000-2005. But for most years I only had one page, and I wanted a little something more. One option would have been to mount our own family Christmas card on cardstock for the left page - except that I've been pretty bad about actually sending out cards in recent years. Lately I've been loving using really big pictures (when I finally post my 2010 December Daily album you'll see what I mean), so that's what I decided to do here. The final format for each year (again, except for 2008 which had more cards, and more photos, than the other years) ended up being: left page, big family photo; right page, collage of Christmas cards. I love it! No stressing, no thinking. No agonizing over embellishment placement or journaling. And it was fast: I put the whole thing together last night (about 6 hours). I plan to get an 8x8 album (probably red), and display it in our home each year during the holidays. Click on the images if you'd like to see them larger.

If you're one of those people like I am that feels guilty about getting rid of things like Christmas cards, yet you don't want to (or have the space to) store piles of them for years on end, this is a great project that provides the best of both worlds.