...what do you do with all the cards?
The Christmas trees line the curbs, waiting for the chipper truck to come by and turn them into mulch for spring gardens.
All the deflated Santa Clauses and Frosty the Snowmen and Mickey Mouse snow globes have been picked up off the lawns and rolled back into their boxes. 
Even the enormous ones. That must be one enormous box. Or maybe he just sleeps in that RV until next Christmas!
There's nothing left to remind you of Christmas except a few leftover candy canes and a pile of Christmas cards.
I still have two cards that I haven't even sent yet. Those cards require letters, which I haven't gotten around to writing. So the recipients are probably all insulted right now that I haven't even sent them a card.
When I was at my kids' school on Monday, volunteering in the library, one of the teachers brought in a whole stack of Christmas cards she had received. She cut off the backs of the cards and the librarian put all the cards in the Bookmark Bin. First-graders were fighting over these. They don't care that it's January. They just wanted that cool picture of the reindeer or the gingerbread house or the big star in the sky.
Some people make gift tags out of their old Christmas cards, but that always seems like way too much work for me. You have to figure out how big to cut the tag, and have some pretty string or ribbon to tie the tag to a package.
The only cards that are easy to deal with are the photo cards. Usually greeting-card photos of children are much better than their school portraits. A Christmas card usually has the best photo someone has taken of the kids all year. School pictures are a one-shot deal, and a windy morning can guarantee that your child will have a bad hair day for the photo! So I take my scissors to the Christmas cards and put the photos in little frames, rather than putting those wallet-size school pictures in the frames.
When my first-grader was a toddler, I bought a small photo album and put all the cards in there. He loved paging through that album and seeing pictures of all his cousins and our family friends.
And a friend of mine puts all the photo cards in a photo album, year after year. She enjoys looking at it to see how all the children have grown up and changed.
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2 Responses to “Now that the holiday is over...”
Thief!!!!! You stole my picture!!!!
It was great to see you for breakfast this morning. We need to get together more often.
My bad! I added an image credit
Will you forgive me?