How I create my Christmas cards – and invites too!

I am a snail mail gal. I send Christmas cards that include an old-fashioned family update letter. I send birth announcements, party invitations, and encouragement notes through our faithful postal service. While I’m all for digital shortcuts in most circumstances, there is something about addressing and stamping an envelope I hold dear to my heart. And I know everyone loves receiving fun mail that isn’t junk, a bill, or jury duty.

I always get lots of questions about where I get my cards and how I design them, so I thought I would share that info here, since it’s officially Christmas card season and all.

First, unless you can design your own cards on Illustrator, Etsy is your friend. I scour Etsy for all my correspondence needs, including birthday invites or Christmas cards. Some recent shops I’ve used are: Katy Girl Designs, Bean Press, Sweet Hammer Press, Babybaloo, and Shelley’s Paper Studio. For Christmas cards, I broadly search for “Christmas photo card” {or something like that}, and then I just click on designs until I find a few options I like. Usually a card will catch my attention and when I click on it, I discover I like many of the cards by that particular designer. When I am throwing a party, I have a theme already so my search will be specific, such as “vintage airplane invitation” or “garden tea party.” If you find something you like, but it’s not exactly what you need, message the shop owner. They can almost always customize their products to fit your needs. For example, I used a wedding shower invite for Zianne’s “Rockin’ Robin” first birthday party, and the designer removed one of the two “love birds” from the illustration for me. I order all my cards as digital downloads, so they usually cost between $10-15 and the owner typically gets them back to me with customizations within 1-3 days of placing my order.

The next step is to print my invites. If I am doing a small batch of invites {fewer than 50} for a party, I will just print locally. OfficeMax/OfficeDepot always does a great job for me. Call your nearest store and ask for the printing center email address. You can email your order and attachments to them directly without dealing with the uploading system on the store website. I email them all the time and say, “Hi, I’d love this many… printed this way… and I’d love to pick them up tomorrow morning…” and they always get my order done super quickly and call me if they have any follow-up questions. When I am sending out more than 50 cards {i.e. Christmas or birth announcements}, I use Overnight Prints. They have amazing 5×7 postcards that can be printed single or double sided. Since I like to include a letter with my Christmas cards, I use this postcard format. I upload my Etsy Christmas card file on the front and add my Christmas letter on the back {which I just write on a customized 5×7 page in Microsoft Word and then save as a PDF}. Since I print on both sides, obviously I can’t mail these as regular postcards. Overnight Prints offers accompanying envelopes for a $5.00 fee, and all my cards and envelopes arrive together. I love companies like Tiny Prints as well, but most of their designs aren’t two sided and wouldn’t allow me to upload a letter. so I love the flexibility and quality that Overnight Prints provides. *One quick note: despite the name, Overnight Prints actually has rather slow shipping. You can get things overnight if you pay a hefty fee, but plan on at least one week mailing time otherwise.

Although I LOVE addressing envelopes because it allows me to experiment with my faux “calligraphy,” I often don’t have time with two kids at home. Now I usually make my own labels in Microsoft Word. There is a template for labels that matches the Avery sheets that have 3 columns and ten rows. I make labels with our return address on them and pick my own design, font, and colors to give them a little flair. I finally copied all our friends’ and families’ addresses as well, and I use these when I don’t have time for hand-lettering. I print these at Office Depot for a couple bucks.

So there you have it. This is how I send mail that is customized and beautiful to celebrate births, birthdays, and holidays. Sure, it’s a little more work on my end, but I love how our cards turn out each year, with no company logos or stringent design parameters. I create exactly the card I want, and I hope they bring a smile to those who receive them.