Christmas Card Organization

If you're like me, I have stacks of old Christmas cards tucked away in a box/bag. Since my friends and family took the time to send these to us, I can't bear to part with them (plus they have really cute pictures on a lot of them!).

After talking with my good pal and organization queen, Amy, I came up with a system for organizing these plus other cards (birthday, halloween, etc.).

 So here's what I did:

I had some of these 9-up, 4x4 page protectors from We R Memory Keepers. They're sold on amazon.com here.  I used this size because it's big enough to get a good portion of most Christmas cards.

 

 I then created these labels in Illustrator to go in the center square of the page protectors so I could identify what year all the cards were from.

 

I had them printed on cardstock at Staples because our color printer has been broken for a long, long time. The font I used for "Christmas" and "2008" is Samantha Upright Pro and the font from the word "Cards" is MTF Hello My Name Is.

Here's the finished product!

I cut out the most interesting part of the front of the card and then I cut out the part on the inside of the card that has the family's name, so most of these are double-sided.  In the event that the card was only one-sided (like most of the picture cards), I put another picture card on the back.

I have these completed for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. It usually takes me two pages (the second page does NOT have the year title card included) to get all the cards. When I didn't have exactly enough cards to fill the spaces, I cut 4x4 squares of Christmas-themed patterned scrapbook paper and filled in accordingly.

I love that I don't have a huge stack of these cards laying around and I also love that they are preserved in a nice way for us to look back on. It was already great to see my grandma's handwriting (my mom's mom) on the Christmas card from 2010 (she passed away in 2011). It's also great to see the kids "grow up" on the Christmas cards!