Custom Christmas Cards – The Perfect Personalized Touch

If you’re looking for a way to create the perfect custom Christmas cards, look no further for I’ve got the answer for you! The key to making that lasting impression is to make your Christmas cards a personalized experience to each person you’re writing to. And no, that doesn’t mean you have to buy difference greeting cards for all your recipients.

I’m sure it’s been said before about many things, but the personalized touch is all about the details. You should start off by picking out your personalized holiday cards design. This design should be something your recipients would like, but more importantly something that reflects your personality. Next pick out a greeting that you would actually say to people in conversation. Creating an original greeting that is universal for your friends is another way to really make your cards unique. There is no escaping having to pen in something in writing to each of your recipients, but remember to make your writing stand out with a high quality pen and ink.

When you personalize your holiday cards, it really makes the season special. Giving generic store bought Christmas cards with nothing more than the person’s name and a generic season’s greetings will have your recipients smile. However, the combination of a beautiful design, a greeting from the heart, and a thought out, hand-printed message written from you in fine ink will have them thankful for seasons to come.

Make Your Own Baby Cards

Celebrate the birth of your new born with your own specially homemade baby cards. Yes, instead of ordering those so expensive baby shower invitations, thank you notes, and birth announcements, why not create them yourself.

You could also make it a special event by inviting some friends or family members over one afternoon to help you create these baby cards. I'm sure they will thoroughly enjoy this meaningful time in preparation for the new born child. You could take some pictures and make a baby journal. What a creative memory! You and your child will treasure it for life.

So get ready all your card making supplies and gather your friends. Design and create your words for the baby announcement cards on your computer.

Print them out on white, cream or soft pastel color cardstocks. Trim with your decorative scissors and layer over soft pastel color designer cardstocks. Then embellished with cute buttons, ribbons, eyelets, tags or any baby stuff.

Be creative! Use rubber stamps or use your own doodle arts, etc. Anything fun, cute and sweet. Yes and most of all have fun in the whole process.

Making Greeting Cards is Easy. Start Card making Today!

Making greeting cards is a wonderful hobby to enjoy with your family and friends. In fact, card making is becoming more and more popular and it's now a novelty to send handmade greeting cards.

Have you ever look at a handmade card and thought to yourself, "So beautiful! I wish I know how to make my own greeting cards." Well, now you can! Imagine people receiving your homemade greetings with your name on the back!

Making greeting cards is easy. Many people are making cards and so can you. Make you own greeting cards and sign them by rubber stamping "Handcrafted by (YOUR NAME)" on the back of every of your handmade cards. Cool!

Taking up card making as a hobby is not expensive since you should have most of the supplies for making greeting cards in your home. For a basic homemade card, all you need is paper, cutter, glue and some color pencils.

But though inexpensive, making greeting cards has many benefits.

Creating beautiful homemade cards is such a rewarding way of spending time with family and friends. The joy of gathering cardmaking ideas, paper, embellishments, and other card making supplies to make the cards and the joy that the handmade greeting cards give to the recipients are just feelings that cannot be purchased. Receiving a handmade greeting card is so special, isn't it?

So start making greeting cards in the comfort of your home by following the instructions on this card making website.

Handmade Thank You Cards

Here are some examples of handmade thank you cards that will, hopefully, inspire you to make some yourself.

These thank you cards will come in very useful. These can be used to say thank you to a friend or anyone who has done you a kind deed, when you received a gift, or even after a funeral.

You can also make some personalised thank you cards for the bridesmaids after a wedding or for those who bring or send gifts after a baby shower.

Make a batch of simple thank you cards so that you always have one ready to send out when the need or opportunity arise.

I have a whole stack of these homemade cards all ready to send out. You should store them all in one place, maybe in one of those plastic drawers. I have this 4 tiers of plastic drawers which I placed beside my worktable. One of these drawers is set aside for only my handmade Thank You cards.

Paper Christmas cards and make your own

You can send personalized Christmas greeting cards by making your own with die-cuts, rubber stamps, or designer paper. Make a photo greeting card by adding a photo of yourself, your family or your pet. Homemade Christmas greeting cards are definitely so much better than Christmas e cards or even store bought paper Christmas cards.

For me, I just love Christmas. It's the season to celebrate. It's the season to exchange warm greetings. Most of all, it's the season to remember the birth of Christ and the reason for His coming into this world.

Usually I begin making my Christmas cards in October or November. Even so there was a year when I couldn't finish all of them. So it is better to start early and have time to leisurely create all your cards.

Choose your theme. Is it going to be a traditional theme this year: Red and Green with Gold Trimmings? Or is it a Black And White Christmas?

Business Thanksgiving Cards – The Christmas Cards Alternative

I know you may think I’m crazy, but by the time Labor Day rolls around, all I can think of is Christmas. Christmas shopping! Christmas decorations! Christmas trees! Christmas carolers! And most importantly, Christmas cards! It’s enough to make even the most relaxed of us turn visions of sugarplums into visions of that mean one, Mr. Grinch!

For those of us already mentally making our list and checking it twice, the act of sending business greeting cards is not strictly a Christmas ritual anymore. This is a relief for a number of reasons. First of all, as much as I’d love to make a point to send my best wishes to colleagues and clients, if I wait until December, I’m taking a gamble on whether those business greeting cards will ever make it to the mailbox! Secondly, if I wait until December, my Christmas cards are bound to get lost in the shuffle with all of the other business greeting cards being sent at the same time.

That’s why business Thanksgiving cards are a great alternative. Thanking those you’ve done business with a month before the norm allows your message to stand out when it’s received and allows you to cross one more task off your list before the end of November. It also saves you the trouble of choosing between Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or Season’s Greetings for the face of the design on your business greeting cards.

There is plenty to be thankful for as autumn and winter are coming upon us, and one of those things is the option of business Thanksgiving Cards!

Personalized Christmas Cards Help You Keep in Touch

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” a quote by John Lennon, is quite profound and can mean different things to different people. To me, it means that life can be so busy and hectic that in many instances we lose sight or control of what we would like to do. Before we know, years have gone by and we regret missing out on the things we wanted to do.

For instance, think of all the people that you have met and lost contact with over many years’ time. Whether it be coworkers, neighbors, teammates from a club or sports team…how many really close friends do you not see as often as before, or perhaps, never?

So how do we try to keep something like this from not occurring? One way is to make sure personalized Christmas cards are sent to those whom you may not have social contact with—either seldom or at all—to let them know they’re in your thoughts. Custom Christmas cards can be personalized with a longer, personal message or a shorter, handwritten message on the inside of the Christmas cards.

In any event, it is the thought that counts (as they say), and keeping touch with someone by sending custom Christmas cards each year is a great way to let someone know you’re still thinking about them even you may not have seen them for a long, long time.

The Pioneer of Corporate Christmas Cards

John Calcott Horsley was an English narrative painter living in London from 1817 to 1903. Some of his better known commissions are two frescoes, painted in the Houses of Parliament and most notably, the holiday card his friend Sir Henry Cole asked him to paint. His friendship with Horsley came from their shared enthusiasm for art and working together to organize The Great Exhibition in 1851.

In 1943 Cole decided that he would surprise his friends with a novel and colorful holiday card at Christmas time instead of the usual Christmas letter. At that time letters were time consuming to write and were hand delivered. Cole’s idea meant that from the lithograph John painted, personalized holiday cards could be printed and mailed in pre-printed penny post envelopes. You could say it was the first form of corporate Christmas cards.

The card measured 5-1/8 by 3-1/4 inches. It was printed in a dark sepia ink and hand colored. The design is framed by a trellis of vines forming three panels. The side panels depict figures representing two of the acts of charity, “feeding the hungry” and “clothing the naked.” In the center is a picture of a family party, including three generations, from grandparents to grandchildren, drinking wine. Below is the greeting, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.”

Within ten years, Christmas cards were the rage of England. Of the 1,000 original personalized Christmas cards printed, only 12 are known to still exist. This card came to be known as the first commercial Christmas and New Year’s card.

Christmas Cards or Holiday Cards? Decisions! Decisions!

A well-meaning office faces a quandary: send clients best wishes for the holidays and appreciation for their business all year with good old-fashioned Christmas cards. Or expand the warmth and gratitude in greeting cards that say “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” instead, to show respect for the culture of each of its customers.

It’s tempting either way. Christmas evokes tradition, comfort, and the times when we lived so similarly to our neighbors and the folks at the office. The Christian faith, the feasts, the gift-giving, and the colorful decorations – these make Christmas a special and irreplaceable time of year for everyone who celebrates it. Christmas cards have been part and parcel of the season for over 150 years. Can you imagine a year where you saw not a single Christmas card all December? Christmas cards for the Christmas holiday…of course!

When all or most of your clients celebrate Christmas, the choice to send business Christmas cards is easy. However, a growing percentage of today’s workforce and clientele observe something other than Christmas in the fall and winter: Diwali, Hanukkah, the New Year, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, and Eid al-Fitr, to name but a few. The globalization of our world can be reflected in holiday cards. While it would be difficult to identify every holiday in a single greeting card, it’s easy and thoughtful to leave the holiday open with a seasonal, non-religious sentiment inside of your greeting cards that lets your recipients know you wish them well, regardless of their religious or non-religious affiliations.

Holiday cards that refer to the “Holidays” or the “Season” give you greater latitude when winter greetings are appropriate and the holidays being celebrated by your recipients vary. Nevertheless, whether you send Merry Christmas cards or greeting cards that wish Peace on Earth, Happy Holidays or Season’s Greetings, any holiday cards you send will surely be appreciated.

Shoebox Greetings Blog (A tiny little division of Hallmark)

When we were kids, my sister and I used to make greeting cards. Not the crappy glue and glitter kind, mind you. Ours were pop-up cards. They had moving parts. She'd draw all the pictures, cut out the parts, color the cards, and assemble the pieces. I'd sit on the floor and watch her work. We made a good team.

I later went on to co-create Lollipopcards.com, an online greeting cards website (the technology eventually became the engine behind earlier versions of MailChimp).

My sister, on the other hand, went on to become an editor at some little company called "Hallmark cards." Poor girl. She just didn't have the drive to follow her dreams, I guess.

Anyways, she just pointed me to their new Shoebox Greetings blog.

If you want a nice example of a "corporate" marketing blog with personality, here you go. If they can keep it up, it's going to be a great blog.

When she was just an intern at this "Hall-Mark" startup, I remember my sister used to bring home a secret, underground newsletter that the Hallmark creatives distributed around the office. It had all kinds of crazy, almost-demented stuff (I said "almost" so as not to offend any people there---but just between you and me, those people can be pretty friggin' demented) that the artists would draw. You could tell they were venting their frustrations after designing happy-fluffy-cutesy cards all day. It was really an awesome newsletter. Now that she's been there a while, she of course denies its existence.

But they do post some of their rejected cards under the "Funny, But No" section of the blog. They're hilarious. There's a book full of those rejected cards too.