December 29 -- Making gift tags from your old Christmas cards

Christmas cards are so beautiful!  I simply love them.  As I continue cleaning out my childhood home, I am discovering afresh that this was also my mother's opinion.  She bought many, she sent many, and she certainly saved many, both new and used.  I am also discovering that many, many people love and collect vintage Christmas cards, and I have the Etsy sales to prove it.  I also have a good-sized vintage card collection of my own.

Yet I find that I simply cannot keep all of the cards which we receive.  I do keep them in a basket for a year, hope springing eternal that one year I will actually follow through on pulling out a card at supper each evening to pray for the person who sent it.  After that year is up, the cards are fair game to be repurposed in other ways.   One of the most obvious and easy ways to use your old Christmas cards is to make gift tags from them. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Sometimes you can use the entire front of a card as a tag, if it has enough blank space to write the to/from information. These are especially nice for family members -- for example, you might have a card front that says "Merry Christmas to a Dear Granddaughter." This is a natural to paste to the top of your granddaughter's Christmas present. These can add a real decorative element to a package wrapped in a solid color like red, green, blue, silver, etc.

The other way is to cut shapes from your old cards to make tags. You can make simple shapes like rectangles, squares or circles. Current, Inc. sells a set of tag templates which work very nicely and has quite an assortment of shapes. A book of children's Christmas stencils would also work well. Once you have cut your shapes you can punch a hole in each one and add some red, green or metallic string to make a hanging tag. 

You could even embellish your tags with glitter, touches of paint, bits of ribbon, or other embellishments, if you are so minded.   Of course, many cards are already well glittered!

What if your family doesn't receive a lot of cards but you'd still like to do this project?  Easy -- just let friends or relatives know you would be happy to take used cards off their hands.  I promise you will have all the cards you will ever need!

This simple project is a fun way to keep your kids busy during Christmas break -- and I personally find that doing a project like this, even all by myself, is very relaxing and a great stress reliever.  There is nothing like cutting and pasting, for me.

Have fun with this idea!