Holiday Card Archive

Yesterday afternoon I spent a few minutes going through my holiday cards from this year. The photos and letters are such a great archive of the lives of our family and friends, I hated to toss them away when I put away all the holiday decorations a few weeks ago. So I held onto them and they've been sitting on my desk until today when I was inspired with an idea for creating this Holiday Card Archive.

The entire project was created using only a manila envelope, a square punch, a black pen and a glue stick. Here's how I did it:

1. Label - First, I divided the cards from the letters and photos and jotted down last names and the date on any of them that didn't already include that information. Years from now, I'm sure I'll be thankful I did.
   
   
2. List - On the backside of the manila envelope, I listed all of the people who we received cards from. I divided them into sub-lists based on our relationship to them (family, school friends, friends from living in Minnesota, Alabama friends, etc).
   
   
3. Crop - Next, for any cards we received, I cropped a representative square from them using a square punch.
   
   
4. Collage - Adhering with a glue stick, I designed a simple collage to decorate the front of the envelope using the punched squares.
   
   
5. Seal - Finally, I put the remaining photographs and letters into the envelope closed it up. Then I stored it with my holiday decorations (and several additional manila envelopes for future years.)

Next year, I plan to buy a basket to display the envelopes along with our other holiday decorations. It will be fun to look back and see how families change from year to year.

I admit, this process might seem to be a little overkill in the "memory-keeping" department, and yes, the cards, photos and letters may all be trashed someday. However, at a mom-related meeting this week we discussed genealogy and how to do family tree research. On the heels of that discussion, in my imagination I have a vision of one of these families looking for information and photographs about their family someday and presto, I'll have their 2007 family photo archived in my folders. Silly, I know...but these are the kinds of things scrapbookers think about!