Hands up, who has bundled all the cards together and put a pile of it in with the Christmas decorations to hide away in storage for 11 months.
My dad always used to do that and cut them up the next year to make present tags. This is a brilliant activity for your children to do. It supports their fine motor skills, it develops their language skills and it means you can introduce the idea of reuse and recycle from an early age.
Even better, they can make their own cards from the cut up illustrations for next years cards, saving you money too.
I have been working a lot with Lyn Lapworth from Eco for All on how to have a more sustainable Christmas. She advises to prioritise cards that do not come with plastic packaging, but even better, reduce the amount we send in the first place. Recycling old cards to make a new design will be a unique and more thoughtful card too. Or simply painting your own. I actually draw all mine for an extra personal touch. Check out my Instagram @more-to_organising to look at this years. I also make my own 3d birthday cards for the children, as I was a DT coordinator for several years when I was a teacher.
Sentimental Cards
Now, I have some cards that I would never want to cut up or recycle. I have a wonderful friend in Canada that sends me a photo card every year with her children growing up, and I actually display them every year. My uncle does the same. I also have the last cards my Grandma and Great Gran sent me so I have their handwriting which means a lot to me. So what do we do with these?
I spoke to Amanda Littlecot from Clear Bubble Photo Organising on what to do.
What can we do with sentimental cards?
"Sentimental cards can be really hard to get rid of whether it is a card from your young children grandchildren or nieces and nephews. But just cause the time to have them up on your shelf is over doesn't mean you can't continue to enjoy them.
One of my favourite options is a rolling wall of card display, where you have a selection of frames on a particular wall of different shapes and sizes where you display all of those cards and keepsakes that you receive. then over time as you get different cards you can replace the cards in the frames to have a continuing different selection of your favourite cards.
But if you don't want to hang them on your wall another option is to digitise those cards so you can keep enjoying the card but without the clutter of the actual card. There are several options to be able to digitise your cards ranging from using an app on your phone like Google Photoscan or Photomyne to take a decent digital image of your card. Another option to digitise your cards is to use the scanner on your printer or a specialist photo scanner. The scanner on your printer what do a slightly better job than your phone but for me any decent scan of your cards then a photo-specific scanner will do the best job.
You don't need to leave the digital versions of your cards stuck on your phone or computer you could load these digital images onto a digital photo frame and enjoy that lovely card all year round, why do Christmas cards have to just be seen at Christmas".
What if I don’t want to get rid of the physical copy?
"If you don't want to get rid of the physical copy and you don't want to put it on the wall we don't want the cards to end up feeling like clutter. so a dedicated storage approach is needed. If you don't have or won't have in the future a lot of cards an A4 expanding file with different sections can be the solution you are looking for. You can do a section by child or person and keep all their cards together.
For bigger collections or larger cards, you could use an artist's A3 all folder and label each card with the event so you so don't forget.
A lovely idea if you have smaller children is to create a memory box of their artwork but also the cards that they have sent you so they can experience the lovely cards that they have sent you over the years."
Why is it a good idea to make it digital too?
"The reason I like to digitise cards is because it is not only easier to share those lovely cards but also you can think of it as a kind of backup for your cards. So don't forget if you all going to digitise your cards make sure you follow the 321 backup approach which means three copies of your digital data at any one time across two formats so say a hard drive and a cloud with one being off-site which you can also do with photos."