How to get your Holiday cards for the fraction of the cost

Every year, the cost of holiday cards just seem to rise exponentially. From the cost of the actual card (it doesn't matter if all the sites offer 50% off- it's still over $1 per card!), plus the cost of the postage stamp, it could be $2-$3 (or more!) to mail out each card! I know people take great joy in selecting their card every year, and I do too, but I have a large address list, with a huge extended family and people that I want to keep in touch with from various parts of my past, so any way I can save has been important to me!

(I take great pride in hand addressing my cards every year. This Paper Source return address embosser has served me well for 15 years. The style has probably changed since I got it from a Secret Santa gift, but I love it!)

One big way I found savings was to upload my image as a POSTCARD vs a holiday card. While the default postcard quality may not be as high as your typical holiday card, you can upgrade the paper type and finishing, and the end result is pretty darn good, and still ends up significantly cheaper. I usually use Vistaprint to print my cards (they have great coupon codes, especially around Black Friday), but office supply stores such as Staples also offer a postcard printing service. This year, I got 250 5x7 double sided cards for $41 through Vistaprint, with combined coupon codes, credit card offers and Rakuten cash back (although I did have to buy my own envelopes- a small price to pay)!

The downside is that you probably have to design your card yourself, since postcard templates are not really holiday card templates. The upside is, Canva is a free program, and there are tons of templates on there already, where you can drag and drop your images, change any elements, and really make the card whatever you want it to be. Sometimes sites such as Shutterfly and Photo affections are pretty limited in the changes you can make to the template, colors, picture orientation, or text, but when you design with a Canva Template, you can do almost anything you want! I loved that my Christmas card this year had enough room for the text and updates that I wanted to post, while fully featuring the picture that I wanted to add. If you are a student or educator, you can use your school email address to sign up for Canva for Education, which is a more premium version, for free! It's super user friendly, and I use it all the time in my personal life and professional life! I encourage you to take a look at how to use it, and I bet that you'll be a pro designing your own cards next Christmas too!