Greetings! How We Organize Holiday Cards

Happy Love Day!

It dawned on me this weekend that around the holidays, I was getting asked frequently about how I was going to organize all of the greeting cards I had received.  Then, it dawned on me that I hadn't actually ever shared the system with you.  Better late than never!  And since today, cards will be given and received, I thought it was the perfect time to pop in with our system.

Here is what I had started with:

Raise your hand if you have been there.  Or still are?  It's OK.  I promise you are not alone.

I love to take photos, but one thing that seems to happen is that I acquire photos of immediate family, mostly my kids and some of our pets.  Above and beyond that, the photos I have of most of our relatives and friends is limited.  That is why I love photo greeting cards.  I get to keep a great photo of my loved ones, each year!  But what good does it do me to leave them in a pile in a box?  How often do I take time to look back through the old photos and smile?  How often do my kids look at the pictures and watch everyone grow with them?  Not at all.  Because they are in a box.  Out of site, out of mind.

So, I decided to organize them a bit better.  I started out by sorting the photos into stacks, by family.  That way, I could go from there and easily figure out the year of each photo.

From there, I sorted down by year.

To encourage frequent trips down memory lane, I decided I would rather the cards live in a photo album on our family room bookshelf.

I found this album at Target for $8.  Not only is it acid free {which is always important when storing photos}, but it is also has the magnetic pages.  This was important because the greeting cards come in every single shape and size imaginable, and the pages give you the freedom to arrange however is clever {there are no dividers for each photo, just a blank slate of a page}:

The rest was simple.  I just printed the year on a 4x6 index card:

And then added the greetings from that year!  Everything from birth and wedding announcements, to birthday invites and holiday greetings.  Anything that has a photo of a loved one!

Some additional notes:

• I saved the "year" index card template to my computer so each year I can just print another and keep on going
• I used my paper slicer to cut down some of the edges of the cards to get them to fit
• Going forward, I will be writing down the year on the back of the card when it is received, to make any future organizing a breeze

 Such a simple project, it only took me about 30 minutes to get my entire stack put into the album.  And I love it so much, I might just snag another album or two, to keep for expanding year after year.

I am sure you are wondering about greeting cards as well?  The kind without the photo.

I only keep those that are REALLY special.  You know, the ones with sweet words and kind thoughts.  The rest are recycled.  If I kept every single holiday and birthday card for each kid and the hubs and I, they would be coming out of our ears.

There are a couple of ways to preserve those cards, you could scan them in and keep them digitally, or you could make a card "book" out of them by adding rings:

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Your turn!  How are you organizing your greetings?  Any other fun and creative ideas?  Love ya!