Creative Holiday Card Ideas

Description: Tips for decorating your Christmas greeting cards with photo stamps, seals, and stickers.

Adding special touches to any greeting card is always a thoughtful idea, but if you’re searching for something unique and memorable but lacking inspiration, look no further. With Christmas fast approaching, make your cards go the extra mile by “dressing” the envelope using personalized photo stamps, seals or stickers.

It used to be that unless you’re one of the few famous people lucky enough to be immortalized on a postage stamp over the years, you had no choice in the designs issued by the post office. Not so any more. Move over George Washington! Now you can create photo postage stamps with an image of your own choosing, a fabulous idea for sprucing up your Christmas card mailings.

And don’t worry. These stamps are real valid postage authorized by the US Postal Service. Stamps.com, the web site behind photo stamps, is an approved provider of online postage so you can order from them with confidence.

Photo stamps normally come in sheets of twenty, so work out how many you think you’ll need and then order enough stamps plus extra for last minute cards (just in case) and for keepsakes in scrapbooks or stamp collections.

To create a personalized photo stamp, first, choose a clear, high resolution digital photo that has the faces, places or holiday scene you want to highlight. Then, follow the instructions on Stamps.com to upload the image. The online customization tool allows you to zoom, move, and rotate your image, and even add a colored border. Remember that stamps are of course small, so choose something without too much detail or you won’t be able to see it very well.

Think about the colors you are using too – if you are going to put the stamps on your Christmas cards you could take a photo of your children wearing red and green jumpers to really make them stand out! There are plenty of other colorful ideas that would fit in really well at this time of year too.

Another way to dress your envelopes and give Christmas cards a bit of flair, is to use coordinating, stickers, seals, or address labels. These too can be designed with a photo of your choice. Check out the web sites at Shutterfly.com and TinyPrints.com for some great designs that can be coordinated with holiday photo cards and notecards.

You can also create seals the old fashioned way by melting sealing wax (available at craft stores) onto the back of the envelope and then stamping it before it dries. However, there is a chance that the wax could come off on its way through the postal system so wax seals are best left for hand-delivered cards.

Finally, one of my favorite ways to decorate an envelope is with rubber stamps. They are inexpensive and easy to find at craft stores and scrapbooking stores. I am an avid rubber-stamper at heart and have collected dozens of holiday stamps over the years. They’re great because I can use them year after year, and the kids have fun too stamping their own Christmas cards and other projects.

So, this year dress your envelopes to the nines with photo stamps, stickers and seals, and send your Christmas cards out with style.

Leanne Tremblay is a successful internet publisher who was amazed at how easy it was to create coffee table photo books from digital family photos. In no time at all, she was hooked. The result was Photo Printing To Go, an idea portal for transforming digital photos into Christmas photo cards, all-occasion photo greeting cards, photo books, and gifts.

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