How to Re-purpose Holiday Greeting Cards into a Holiday Keepsake

Hi There! Don’t throw away those holiday greeting cards yet! Try this tutorial and re-purpose them into a family keepsake! This is a VERY EASY Re-Purpose/Recycling Craft project for those Holiday Greeting cards that you may not know what to do with!

If you are like most people, you probably feel guilty throwing away greeting cards from loved ones. Check out this tutorial to create a Holiday keepsake using those cards – I’d love to see pictures of your finished project if you try this out. We made one in 2014 and now our 2015 Holiday Greeting Cards!

We have all of our Wedding photos in an album and I kept many of our kids “firsts” greeting cards. The number of Holiday cards that we receive has decreased over the years. With stamps at $0.49, who wants to spend the money to mail even 20-40 cards? Still, we received about 40 Holiday greeting cards this year and last year. I used to toss the cards in the recycling bin, but these days I’m all about finding a new purpose for old things. So I decided to create a Photo Album using the cards as my “pages.”

You don’t need any fancy equipment to create one of your own – just scissors, ribbon or book rings, scrap paper card stock, hole puncher (single hole puncher works best) and Alphabet/Numerical stencil (optional).

Start by sorting through the cards, I cut the greeting part from each of mine so it was just the front of the card left (no folded cards) and discarded it. We received some Photo cards in in those cases I kept the photos – they are close friends and family and how great would it be to show them that you kept their Holiday card for several years!

Place the cards in order from smallest to largest – whatever size/length that makes sense to you as long as it’s clean looking like a book.

Use a hole puncher (I used a 3-hole puncher as well as a single hole puncher because of the different card sizes) and punch holes on the side of each card so they are aligned in a book format. Once the holes are punched, cut some scrap card stock to use as the front and back covers for the book and punch holes in that as well. I used my Cricut Paper trimmer to cut my card stock but scissors will do fine!

Assemble everything and use the book rings or ribbon/twine/string through the holes to hold the pages together. Take your Alphabet Stencil sheet and be creative with the Album Cover. I just wrote “Christmas Memories” with the year but maybe add a family name or something else fun for your family.

Insert your Favorite Holiday Memories from the past year (this will encourage you to print some hard copy photos). Here’s one with my Mr. and Leela at her school making Gingerbread Houses. I probably would have stuck this photo in a box and forgot about it if not for this Re-purposed Holiday Card Album!