We send quite a lot of Christmas cards, between 70 and 80 each year. It sounds a bit daft but the rest of the year I am not a thoughtful person. I am hopeless at remembering birthdays and even worse at the advance planning involved in getting a card to someone on time via the post. Texting has made me even lazier. My new year resolution might be to reach for my friend Caroline's standards in this area. She remembers all of our significant occasions with at least a text and a handmade homemade card arrives for my birthday, our anniversary and at Christmas!
In contrast to this evidence of the lack of a 'hallmark' gene, last year I put our entire christmas card list on a spread sheet and mail merged labels for the envelopes. The time this saved was even more than I anticipated. I print our cards myself (photo of the kids on the front) and added a little synopsis of the family's year, printed labels with a return address on them and bought self adhesive stamps. So everybody received an informative seasonal greeting on time(!) from our house last year and once the spreadsheet was up and running it only took a couple of evenings instead of several like previous years.
If you are not spreadsheet and mail merge literate seek out the help of a computer savvy teen or student to set you up, negotiate a fee or barter. Once it's done it will only need to be edited from year to year, so learn how to do that bit. The key is entering each line of the address in a seperate column and I find it easiest to include the entire name in one column. eg: "Mr and Mrs Cleansheets" or "The Cleansheets Family"
This evening I looked through the list, I changed some addresses and I have a couple of new addresses to seek out, in the coming days.
The last posting dates for different postal services are here. For standard letters to the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia it's 8th December. For Central and South America and for the rest of the far flung world it's 4th December.
If you're sending anything include a return address. Did you see all that stuff that goes for auction if they can't find the recipient or the sender?!?!?
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