Our 2022 holiday cards

Usually when the stationery shops I follow release their holiday collections, I fall in love right away with a particular design. That makes it easy to plan photo outfits, etc. Nothing really jumped out at me this year, despite scrolling through hundreds of card designs.

This might be our last year for photo cards. I love to receive any type of card, but I’m a bit over sending photo cards myself. They feel impersonal despite having our family picture plastered across the front. Some services will address and mail your photo cards for you, which doesn’t seem quite right. What separates those cards from the ones our insurance company sends?

Without any standout card designs to be seen, I ended up designing ours myself with Canva. (This is not a sponsored post on behalf of Canva, this is just how I obtained Christmas cards for 2022.) I have a pro account that I use for the blog and occasionally for my day job, so I have access to their entire template library and premium graphics. It’s well worth the $12.99/month. Back in grad school, as part of my student job, I was for some reason tasked with designing bookplates in Photoshop despite not really knowing Photoshop. I remembered the open source Victorian graphics I used to use. Back in 2009, I scanned them out of a book, but you can of course find them online as vector graphics today.

Canva will print your cards professionally (I chose the premium paper and uncoated finish options) and will include envelopes. The only part of the process I didn’t like was that I couldn’t really customize the envelopes the way I wanted to. I ended up making matching address labels instead. It’s fine. The recipients will spend five seconds or less thinking about my 2022 holiday card envelope design.

I strongly considered sending traditional folded cards this year and will probably do that next year. Don’t get me wrong, as I said, I love receiving holiday cards of all types and seeing people’s family photos! I’ll probably still include a photo inside any folded cards I send. It's not necessarily always fun to do the yearly holiday photo shoot, but I do love the photos we have as a result.