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Frugal Creative Gift Ideas for Holiday Cards

December 1, 2009 by FIRE Finance

Dec 1, 2009: Creativity replete with enthusiasm knows no bounds. Holidays provide special opportunities to express them. More so since this is one of the rare times of the year when we can give in abundance to our loved ones. Creative personalized ideas help us to use our resources skillfully without breaking our budgets. Here are some creative inspirations for this holiday season's cards.

e-Cards: For netizens and people who have access to the internet, we can send FREE e-Cards. If we can spare some time, we may go ahead and make some beautiful personalized slide-shows with music, words and photos. A cool FREE resource is SmileBox.

Postcards: Usually the postage for postcards is cheaper than regular cards. So it helps to create a separate mailing list for postcards and find suitable ones for all on the list.


Reuse: We can reuse some of our cards from various past occasions and festivities. Not only do they save us money but they also help us to save some beautiful cards from ending up in trash.

• A nice way of creating a postcard is to cut the beautiful side of the card and use the blank reverse side to write a note and mailing address. And we must not forget to leave some room for postage.
• If we want to create a card, then we can get some sturdy color paper, fold it properly and stick the pretty picture from our old card on the top.
  

Buy on Sale: Christmas cards go on sale in December. So it is a nice time to be an early bird and purchase in bulk. But we must make it a point to go through each card carefully. Its best to avoid cards which look cheap and get the pretty ones!

Use spare photos: If we have extra sets of photos that will not go into our albums, then they can be used to create homemade photo cards. This is a fantastic way to personalize a card. It has always been very well appreciated by our near and dear ones.

Kids Artwork: For those of us who have children can make use of our kids artwork to create fantastic cards for our family and friends. Usually kids love to paint special pictures for their grandparents, aunts and uncles, as well as siblings and cousins. It also helps them to bond and get rooted to their families.

Replace: Sometimes a few of our loved ones prefer a personal phone call more than a card. In such occasions we give them a call. We use our cell phones' minutes to make these calls. When we max out our cell phone, we use an inexpensive VOIP program like Skype which allows unlimited calls to any phone in US or Canada for less than $3 per month!

Order in Bulk: When there is a need to create professional looking customized photo cards or special holiday cards (say for our businesses) we use online services like Zazzle's Greeting Cards or WinkFlash.

Your creative idea goes in here:



Newsletters: Matthew from FinanceIsPersonal has provided a fantastic idea of emailing newsletters with details of what's going on in our lives instead of sending out Christmas cards. An e-newsletter has great potential since we can add our digital photos, links to our websites or blogs and customized audio recordings for our loved ones. And the best part is that its FREE except for our efforts. Thanks Matthew!

Let us unleash the creative genius hidden within each of us. To create an interactive list of fun ways to frugal yet personalized holiday cards we are looking forward towards your experiences and feedback.

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