I’d love to connect with you on Instagram, where I share home, health and lifestyle tips!

Christmas Cards have been a tradition every year for me and I have a passionate love/hate relationship with them. My sister is an amazing photographer, so we have been so fortunate to have her take our photos each year. I have been practicing calligraphy for about 8 years, so every year I feel a lot of desire to hand paint each address while sipping hot chocolate and watching a Hallmark movie. I love a thick, beautiful Christmas card that screams luxury, while simultaneously having a personal touch and a type of magical/fun/witty update on our lives (basically as far opposite of generic as one can go). …on a budget.

As much as I adore this tradition, “something’s gotta give” so that I am not ignoring my son during the precious few hours that I have in the evenings after work or days off that we have together. What I have saved in money in previous years, I have paid twofold in time to hand make or address the cards. Instead of working on dozens photos of me holding my son, I actually want to be holding him and making the most out of the coziest time of the year (totally cheesy and totally true).

I loved the concrete advice that another mom was sharing on Instagram (@Shan.Tripp) to make the most out of the holidays: Write down EVERY SINGLE THING you want to do this holiday season, then go through the list and decide what you can DELEGATE and what you can DELETE. Do I need to be the sole person that orders every single Christmas gift? DELEGATE! Is there an event that I feel obligated to go to, but I don’t feel passionate about? DELETE! (Just be sure to RSVP as soon as possible that you can’t make it!).

One thing that I will be delegating this year is making and addressing my Christmas cards. I found Basic Invite and was really impressed by the variety of modern and cute Christmas Cards they had to choose from. They also let you customize the cards with over 180 colors and you can order samples to feel the weight of the card and see the colors in person (would be so amazing for wedding invites). They have over 500 Christmas Cards to choose from and are currently offering 30% off using the code “holi30.”

We decided to go with the Merry Script Christmas Card and I changed the color of the script to a deep burgundy and went with double thick matte paper. I would definitely recommend personalizing/ordering on a desktop or laptop over a mobile device, as it’s much easier to get a feel for the card size and personalization options.

THEY WILL MAIL FOR YOU, FOR LESS

If you have everyone’s addresses, I would highly recommend “adding mailing service” to save you all of that work and it costs less than mailing yourself ($0.35 instead of $0.49)! My only “tip” for ordering Christmas cards is that you can’t order addressed envelopes AND have blank envelopes/extra cards in your order (I like to hand out cards in person). I would have totally used “mail for you,” but I wanted extra cards, so I added “fake” recipients so that I could have most of my cards arrive addressed for free, then I tossed the extra fake addressed envelopes. The envelopes came with self-sealing envelopes (the kind with stickers on the envelope line), so I kid you not when I say we stuffed and closed 60 envelopes in 10 minutes or less.

TIP (I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, mean this):

Select for them to address your envelopes.

MARKET COMPARISON

I price compared between Basic Invite, Minted, and Artifact Uprising. Without any discount codes:

70 cards (on double thick matte paper, colored AND ADDRESSED envelopes, and a photo and text on the back) from Basic Invite was $191.10 (again, as of right now you can also use “holli30” for an additional 30% off).

For a similar card with similar options from Minted (although they didn’t have anywhere near as many color options for card text or envelopes). the total was $347.75.

I have used Artifact Uprising in the past, but couldn’t actually find what I wanted on their site (they only had 4 colors to choose from for personalizing the front of the card and did not allow me to choose a rounded edge). They didn’t have many colors of envelopes to choose from (and didn’t have the green I wanted). They also charge $0.40 for addressing each envelope.

Basic Invite has cute cards and invites for pretty much any event you can think of, so we will definitely be using them again in the future!

Christmas cards can be a meaningful way to keep in touch with family. I hope you feel the love of your family this year, near and far.

XOXO,

Traci