WAIT! Don't Toss Those Cards. Do This Instead.

My little family has lived in three different states. Minnesota, California, Minnesota again, and Colorado. Every time we have moved it’s been hard to say goodbye to the friends we made and the places we’ve grown to love.

So… getting Christmas cards at our home is a big deal.

We love hearing from our friends and catching up with their family news. It’s so fun to look at the pictures and see how the kids have grown (not how the parents have aged!). Sadly, another Christmas approaches and we find we haven’t communicated with these special people in the interim.

Each year I resolve to do better but time happens at warp speed. That isn’t an excuse-just reality. Mine and my friends. Probably yours, too. ( I hold on to the thought that we will have eternity to be together. Then I feel a little better about it.)

As Christmas comes to a close and the card arrivals less frequent ( I do have some friends that have sent Christmas greetings on Valentine’s Day!) I put everything away EXCEPT for those Christmas cards. I’m not a hoarder. Let me explain.

We use the cards for prayer.

Beginning in January, at dinnertime, each family member picks one Christmas card from the pile. Then we go around the table and pray for each family chosen that evening. The prayed for cards then go in a separate pile. We continue this until all the families represented by cards have been prayed over.

In the prayed for pile I usually extract the family picture cards and put them in an album. The front of the beautiful folded printed cards, I give to my mom. She uses those to make gift tags. As it turns out, those cards can have many uses!