Having a baby has made me really evaluate how I spend my time and money. As a full-time working mama, free time is almost non-existent and the list of things to do during that small amount of time seems never-ending. And adding the major expense of childcare each month will cause you to really think twice about extra expenditures. The biggest priority has, of course, become spending time with my precious little man, which has forced me to really prioritize the “other stuff” meaning some stuff just doesn’t make the cut. It was starting to look like Christmas cards would be one of those things this year, when my husband had an out-of-the-box suggestion that I normally wouldn’t have considered.
I will admit that I did feel a little bad that the year we actually have a kiddo to feature on our Christmas card, we decide to not do “traditional” Christmas cards. But I got over that pretty quickly when I realized how much easier and more affordable the digital option was. My other concern was that I truly enjoy receiving and opening Christmas cards from others each year, so I imagine that others might feel the same way and I just wasn’t sure if going the digital route would be quite the same. Once I did a little research (and by that I mean approximately 5 minutes of Internet surfing), I felt like it was still a very nice experience and similar to that of opening the card in the mail when you open it in your email. So it was settled, we were going to live up to our millennial status and go digital!
I checked out just a few websites that offered digital cards and quickly settled on Greenvelope. They have a preview of what their cards look like to the recipient, which I viewed and liked, and I quickly found a card design I liked.
Designing the card is basically exactly the same as it is when you design a traditional card online, with lots of customization options. In all I maybe spent about an hour total picking out, designing and sending our card. The majority of that was spent compiling emails for those we were sending to, as I have a list of addresses I’ve previously used each year, but creating an email list was new. Obviously this is a one time thing you need to do the first time you go with a digital card. I just put them all into an Excel spreadsheet that I could upload to Greenvelope. And the real kicker is, it was less than a quarter of what I would have spent on traditional cards!
They also have the option to download a high-quality image of your card (that is suitable for printing), so you could choose to print a few cards on cardstock or at a local printer if you wanted to have a few hard copies for anyone that you feel might not be quite up to speed with the whole digital thing. I initially thought I might do this for a few older relatives, but I ended up choosing not to in the end (just an extra thing on my to do list). But the option is there, which is really nice.
Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out and how much stress it removed from my holiday season, and hopefully those that received it enjoyed it too!
Have you ever done a non-traditional Christmas card? I’d love to hear about what you did and how it went!
From our family to yours, wishing you all the joy this holiday season!!
Shannon
