Forget about Halloween, or even Thanksgiving, right now, retailers are all about Christmas. My email inbox is being choked by hundreds of solicitations for holiday greeting cards. I got one note which suggested that if I didn’t select my card choice by the end of the month friends and family wouldn’t receive my greeting in time for the celebration of Jesus’ birth.
Really.
To be perfectly honest, I am considering not sending greeting cards this year. However, I think about how much I enjoy receiving holiday well wishes from others, and I am guilted into sending overpriced cards to everyone on my list.
The other bonus to getting a flood of holiday cards is that they can be used to fill scrapbooks. While you may be tempted to toss old greeting cards into the recycling bin, by using some imagination, you can turn those greetings into scrapbook gold.
Repurposed greeting cards yield cheap and pretty embellishments. You can cut-out designs that are especially stunning and add them to various layouts. In addition, heartfelt words contained in the cards can be used in journaling blocks or copied around photos as frames or used as page borders. Another option is to attach the entire card to a scrapbook page; however, you need to make sure you do so in a way that you can read the message inside.
Holiday greetings are not the only type of cards that can be displayed in a scrapbook. Many new brides feature well wishes they receive on their wedding day in a card memory book. To make the layouts more personal, pair a card with a photograph of the person who gave it to you. Similarly, you can commemorate the birth of a baby by creating an album of greeting cards. A popular page design features one or two cards along with a photo of the mom-to-be opening the gifts that went with them.