It has come and gone. Another Christmas season. We spent yesterday taking down decorations and cleaning up our house. This meant it was time to take down my Christmas cards...but not before I found a new purpose for them.
I love getting Christmas cards in the mail. It is about the only time of the year that I consistently check our mailbox. I especially love cards with pictures. It is fun to see how family and friends have grown over the year.
I decided a few years ago that I needed a better system than just tossing the cards into a basket. There they sat, with no one looking at them and enjoying them. Definitely not what anyone hopes for when they are painstakingly selecting pictures, card type, ordering cards, writing out names and addresses. I decided to make the cards part of our Christmas decorations. I hung red ribbon from some of the cabinets in my kitchen. Then I took a bunch of clothespins and covered them in washi tape. I picked a few different red and white patterns. Not only was this "Christmasy" and festive, but it matched my tomato red kitchen. As the cards rolled in, I'd clip them up on the ribbon.
No longer did the cards sit ignored. We got to look at them every single day. And so did our family and friends who came over in the month of December. A perfect solution. Yet I wanted to take it a step further. How could I enjoy these cards all year long? Well, I wasn't going to let them hang off my cabinets all year so I needed a different idea.
So what do I do? I cut out the pictures from the cards and make it into a collage on a bulletin board in our hallway. That way, all year long, we look at pictures of our friends and family from the past year.
I made the bulletin board a few years ago. I found a framed picture at the Salvation Army that had a decorative frame. I threw away the glass and the picture and painted the frame to match my hallway. I bought a roll of corkboard (at Lowes or Home Depot I think) and secured it to the frame using hot glue. I needed it to be a little sturdier so I attached a thick piece of cardboard to the back. It is not pretty I will tell you that. But you can't tell from the front and it does the job every year.
If you haven't gotten rid of your Christmas cards for this year, you've got a new idea of what to do with them instead of just throwing them away.