saving and organizing your Christmas card photos

What are you planning to do with all of the Christmas card photos you received throughout the month of December? Will you stuff them in a box of photos? Save them in some organized way? Or have you already thrown them away?!

I used to just save them haphazardly in photo boxes, but last year after the holidays were over, I punched two holes in each photo from that year and held them together with book rings. They were pretty easy to flip through, but the dimensions and orientation of the photos weren’t uniform. It worked, but I didn’t love it.

Then in November, I watched a 3-day online workshop by Becky Higgins on Scrapbooking with Project Life. (The class was free to stream live, but it would be expensive to access it now.) Becky suggested trimming your Christmas card photos and slipping them into Project Life photo pocket pages. Of course! So smart!

On New Year’s Day, I spent some time gathering and organizing the Christmas card photos we’ve kept since 2009, the year Tim and I met. I don’t know what went wrong in 2011, because I could only find three photo cards from that year, but otherwise, our collection was pretty much intact — in several different boxes of photos.

I trimmed most of the photos to either 3×4″ or 4×6″, but a few were smaller, so I just attached them to cardstock with washi tape. Then I slipped them in the pockets. At the beginning of each year’s photos, I added a simple card that I designed and printed with the year on it. I didn’t worry about starting a new year on a new page. That graphic card with high contrast will make it obvious where a new year begins.

I’m not ready to tuck the most recent photos into an album yet, but I’m prepped for the day when it’s time to put the 2013 cards away.

Becky Higgins wrote a great blog post on New Years Day about saving and organizing your cards in this way, so I’d recommend checking it out if you’re considering doing this.

I’m planning to dedicate one album to Christmas card photos so that we can pull it out each year in December and look at how much our friends — especially the kids! — have changed from year to year.

Also, I’m considering making the year cards available as a printable. If you’re interested, let me know in the comments.