Reuse your Greeting Cards to Spread Joy to Others

After all the holiday presents have been exchanged, the tree taken down, and the ornaments put away, how many of you still have up your holiday cards laying around?  I tend to keep mine up a little longer because I love the festive colors that adorn my mantel.

Usually, I take off the pictures that my friends give me of their kids and store them away in my albums and toss the rest into the recycling bind.  Diane at the Big Green Purse mentioned that she uses her old holiday cards for gift tags.  I thought what a brilliant idea.

Each year, I must give out 50 plus boxes of pumpkin butter puree to all my kids teachers with my minimalistic wrapping solution inspired by Beth of Fake Plastic Fish.  However, I was cutting up paper apples that I had from another project to make little tags for the gifts.  To add to my already uber-green-holiday regime, I thought how cool would that be to add different color holiday messages to my gifts? It is great having an eclectic mix of green friends to draw inspiration from!

Well what about those cards? Most of my cards I get now are pictures of my friends’ kids with a short holiday greeting.  I don’t know about you, but I rarely get the folded cards anymore.  Do you find that you get a lot of the glossy holiday cards?  Unfortuneately, I could only cut out about ten or so greeting for next year.  For those of you who get more cards, you will do better than me.

But why stop at the Holiday cards, cut out sayings from birthday, wedding, anniversaries, or any other occasions. Don’t forget to cut out color pictures.   The pictures and saying can be used for scrap booking, kids’ projects, decoupage, and any other artist endeavor.

Around the web, I found the following other articles with a host of terrific ideas how to reuse your greeting cards:

• 10 Crafts for your Old Christmas Cards.   I really got a kick out of this suggestion:

“RECYCLE THEM. I think you need to have the right personality to get away with this, but my brother did it with great success and gave everyone a laugh. Simply cross out the name on the card and write your own name in. Then mail them to your friends and family next year! For an added touch, have an office store make a stamp for you that says “Recycled Card.” Then you can stamp this on the back or on the envelope.”

Would you do this?

• Uses for Old Christmas or Greeting Cards via Thrity Fun.  I love the CD suggestion along with accompanying photo.  The commenter on the article took a picture from her greeting cards and attached to a CD and hung it as an ornament for her tree.   If you celebrate Christmas, you could take your family and friends’ holiday photo cards and cut out the pictures to have very personalized ornaments of your loved ones.

Not into being crafty?  Send all of your greeting cards, not just holiday cards to  St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, a home for abused children in Nevada.  The children make them into new cards for different occassions. For more information on how to purchase these cards, see here.  On their website is the following information:

We are accepting used, all-occasion cards from:
November 15, 2009 – February 28, 2010 (Editor: See Note below)

You can mail your donations to:
St. Jude’s Ranch for Children
Recycled Card Program
100 St. Jude’s Street – Boulder City, NV 89005
877-977-SJRC (7572)

To see if the dates are extended, call or visit the website.  As I was reading about this program, I thought this would be a great school, religious organization, or  not for profit collection program for the kids to get involved in.  I forwarded the program to my Kids Care PTA chairperson to see if her committee would be interested in a collection  for this year or perhaps gear up for it for next year.  Thanks to Inform, Inc for the heads up.

Readers, so what is your favorite way of re-using your greeting cards?  Send me a picture so I can put it on the website.

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• 10 Tips for a Green Christmas. Start with the Tree.
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