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A Few Thoughts on Holiday Cards It's November. Apart from being national Jennifer Lawerence month, November means a few things: mustaches get longer, the lattes change from pumpkin to gingerbread, and Christmas will soon be everywhere we look.

I was told last year that I should have included a picture with my Christmas cards that wasn't just the back of Sebastian's head. I thought it was cute and very pinterest-esque, but nonetheless, I set out to have proper family photos taken this fall.

Now that I have some great pictures of us (stay tuned later this week for more details on that!), I need to pick a Christmas card. I wasn't sure if I was just going to use regular cards and print copies of one of our favourite family pictures to include, or actually order photo holiday cards, but when I was asked if I could look at Minted's Christmas Cards, I started to get really excited about all of the amazing options for photo cards out there. I've never done photo holiday cards before, so I'm looking forward to trying something new.

Below are my favourites. I still haven't picked a final one yet. Do you have any suggestions? I know for sure I'll choose the folded card option instead of flat cards. And I'm leaning towards using one image on the front instead of a collage. I do love some of the templates they have with more than one photo, but I think just one main image is more my style. Top Row: Season's Favorites, Block of Joy, Peace Joy Love
Middle Row: Complete Tree (A creative collage of family photos), Merry and Bright Hand Lettered,  Aglow
Bottom Row: Joynormous, Picture Perfect (I love the washi tape style on this one), Covered in Joy

What I loved about playing with the Minted website is that I could upload my own photo, and all of the photo card templates would change to my picture. This made the process of narrowing down my choices much faster because I could see right away what would work and what wouldn't.

Once I have that all figured out, the next conundrum I have is the holiday letter. Do people still do this? I know my mom does, and so I have been for the past few years, but I wonder...do people care? Do I really need to write a whole paragraph about each person in our family? Or is the age of technology such that pretty much everyone I'd send a card to knows what I've been doing all year via Facebook, Instagram, etc etc etc? It's no secret that I even blog about the big stuff going on with our family!

I don't want to drop the letter entirely, so I've been toying with different ways to share some highlights of our year. I like this style of letter that I found on Etsy, but I'd make my own. Minted also has some pretty great interior options that I think I could make work. The format below is one of the interior card options available. I'd take the 4 boxes and write about highlights from each season. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this. I enjoy thinking about our year growing as a family and having one document that highlights the amazing things we did that year, and even the challenges we conquered. I'm just wondering if the letter format is still the best for us. I'm also not sure I'm totally sold on the infographic format that I see on a lot of cards as well. I have no idea how many books we read this year, or how many date nights Rob and I had. Ugh!! Decisions, decisions!

The last cool thing about Minted's holiday cards is that for a limited time, their recipient address printing is FREE! I can't wait to take advantage of this. I'm not sure what they mean by "limited time" though so check their website. I know for a fact I'm not the first of my friends to start planning their Christmas cards. I have one friend who was home from work with a small injury and couldn't really do much, so she already started writing her cards out! And that was a few weeks ago! lol

I hope you found some inspiration in a few of the unique cards I found on Minted. I still feel like I haven't really recovered from the Polar Vortex or last year's major ice storm, but winter is coming!


A big thanks to Minted for sponsoring this post. All thoughts, opinions, card selections, and conflicted feelings about Christmas newsletters are entirely my own.

Winter is coming image via Pinterest. Other images via Minted.

Posted by Jennifer at 19:11 Labels: Christmas, Holidays, Photography

