I’m a sucker for a holiday card. I mean who doesn’t love getting physical mail that isn’t a bill nowadays?? It really does feel like we went from mail being exciting, to email being exciting, STRAIGHT back to mail being exciting again. It’s like cable versus Netflix… but anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is, holiday cards are magical. Without being cliché and over emotional, they connect you to the people you love, who you may or may not get to see regularly. And with the pace of our lives now, and the accessibility of social media, it might feel silly to print a photo of your family and send it to the people you care about. They can just get that on your Facebook wall, right?

WRONG. I mean, kind of wrong. Technically, yes, they can, but it’s not the same. And when I say it’s not the same, I don’t mean in the “social media is the devil” kind of way, because I like a good doom-scroll as much as the next over-tired Mama. What I mean, is you can’t hang a Facebook post on your wall. You can’t put it on your mantle. Your friends can’t flip through them and get reminders about you and your kiddos ten years from now when they’re going through all of the boxes of “memory stuff” that end up in the basement or the attic.

And yeah, I know that’s where holiday cards end up in the long run. But while they’re on the mantle? They bring JOY. And I personally don’t think there’s anything more magical than spreading joy.

Okay fine, but where do I start??

With holiday cards kind of going out of style, it might feel like it’s difficult to figure out where to start. And it’s not exactly a skill that our parents passed down to us, so… what do you do?

Well, lucky for us, some magical places across the internet still make holiday cards easy to create, with accessible templates that are super easy to use!! And one of them is my absolute favorite place to make things. One guess?

CANVA. 

Choose a Template

It feels a little weird to give a tutorial of creating a holiday card in Canva, since realistically… it’s so easy that the steps don’t really feel worth outlining. But, I’m going to give them to you anyway!

First, the easiest search term to use when you’re looking for a template to start with is “Christmas Card” – but don’t worry, you can sub that in for “Holiday Greetings” when we get to some of the later steps!

You can also get a little more specific, if you have a vibe that you want to go for. Like, if you want to keep it minimal, you can search for “Minimal Christmas Card” and it’ll bring back all of the templates that are Christmas cards… but minimal! You’ll find options in vertical formats and horizontal formats, with pictures, and without!

When you’re picking, if you don’t have a paid Canva account, make sure you pay attention to the little “pro” icon in the bottom corner of the template listing. If a design is “pro” you have to have a pro account to use it!

Make your template YOURS

Once you’ve got your template picked out, it’s time to make it yours! You can replace all of the text, change the colors, add elements – the customizations are limitless. Well, mostly limitless. The only limitation is whether you have a pro account or not, because some fonts, for example, are only able to be used within pro accounts. But trust me, even with the free version of the app you won’t have any trouble making the template you’ve picked feel like its your own!

Play with the colors, and get creative! You can definitely go for classic holiday vibes, OR, you could lean into bright and colorful! There’s no reason that the holiday season has to stay red and green.

You can even print straight through Canva!

If you want to, you can even order prints of your cards right through Canva! But, it might be easier to take the design and feed it into another tool like Vistaprint, where you can super easily make sure that the content on the INSIDE of your cards is also printed. The pricing is a little more economical through them too, so it really depends on whether you plan on having a super simple message inside your cards, or you’re going super old-school and giving your family members an update on the parts of your life that you didn’t share on social media!

What I’m saying, is there’s no excuse!

I’m not trying to convert you to my old-school ways, but…

I’m kind of trying to convert you to my old-school ways (LOL.) Between all of the tools available to make printing your family photos easy and quick, there really isn’t a good reason NOT to send a holiday card to your people this year!

Social media is fleeting, and in the age of influencers, it just feels so much less genuine than a printed card that your cool humans can hold in their hands. So USE those photos you got this year! Or, consider scheduling a mini-session to grab a holiday-specific photo (or photos!) that you can use on a card.

There are still some mini-sessions available for this season, and with the turnaround on sessions with Jessica Strobel Photography (me, of course) you’ll still have your images in time to create the perfect card to send to your friends and family!

P.S….

There are ALL KINDS of other things that you can do with your Holiday Mini images – just check out these options that you can grab STRAIGHT through your gallery!