It won’t be long until your mailboxes will start piling up with Christmas cards from friends and family. You’ll proudly display the cards in your homes until the end of December, and then what happens to them? Well, if you’re me, you put them in plastic zipper bags, write the year on the front, and toss them in one of your Christmas decoration totes. You see, I have a hard time throwing away sentimental items. Some call it ‘hoarding’. I call it ‘memory treasuring’. It’s not like I’ve been stockpiling newspapers since 1998, and I can’t find my 16 cats in my hoarder’s den. So in an attempt to organize and make my past Christmas cards more useful, I made them into Christmas card books.
I started by gathering my Christmas card bags. See. I wasn’t lying.
I created a few 6 inch by 8 inch covers for the Christmas card books, which you can download for free at the end of this post. My Christmas gift to you. Ho, ho, ho.
I printed a cover onto card stock, cut it to size, and used a hole punch to make two holes on the cover. Then, I used the cover as a template to punch the holes in the cards.
After all the cards were hole punched, I grabbed two binder rings and started slipping the cards onto the binder rings. I did one binder ring at a time, but do whatever works for you. Once all the cards were on the rings I added the cover, closed the rings, and wrote the year on the front of the cover.
I displayed the books in a small basket, that I jazzed up with some ribbon and a bow, on an end table in our living room.
This project was super simple and inexpensive. My kind of project. I will admit, my hand was a little sore from all the hole punching the next day.
You can download your preferred cover{s} below. Enjoy and happy Christmas card organizing!
Click here to download.
Click here to download.
Click here to download.
Want more Christmas goodness in your life? Check out my other holiday projects here.
Kathy C. says
December 12, 2012 at 9:24 AMThanks so much for sharing this! I decided this year I would keepsake all our Christmas cards!
Emily says
December 12, 2012 at 4:04 PMFabulous idea!
Lisa says
July 7, 2014 at 12:17 PMChelsea, LOVE ‘clearing fridge clutter’. I love that u overlapped the pieces and used liquid nails! I can do that! Thank you.
Kim Robinson says
November 30, 2015 at 1:32 PMThis is just an awesome idea, thank you so much and for the print outs too.
Chelsea @ two twenty one says
December 1, 2015 at 11:07 AMYou’re welcome!
Kim~madeinaday says
November 14, 2016 at 1:27 PMCute & clever idea! Thanks for linking up to Merry Monday! Pinned! Have a great week!
Kim
ShootingStarsMag says
November 15, 2016 at 9:13 PMI really love this idea! I keep cards from significant birthdays and graduations, so I might need to go back and make little books for those! I don’t tend to get many Christmas cards, but if I do in the future. LOVE this.
-Lauren