It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Cards

The Christmas Card Class of 2025

For many years, I have made and sent Christmas cards. Christmas cards may seem a little bit passé and kitschy, but I like doing it. I have found that it is one of the best ways for me to mark the occasion and get into the spirit of the time of year. I had a friend many years ago who was into this crafty Yuletide activity, and I picked up the habit. It was perfect for a former serial letter-writer like me.

In the post-Thanksgiving hours, I spend a lot of time making cards. The table becomes a visual cacophony of ink pads, stamps, cut-up paper patterns and bits of old Christmas cards, a trusty glue stick, copious amounts of stickers, a scratch pad to get rid of excess ink, colored Sharpies and gel pens, and an old folder used as a platform to make a clean print upon. I have a long list of recipients on both sides of the pond… and keep it on hand for consultation the next year.

The very messy card-making workspace

I’ve never been sure if a majority or minority of the homemade Christmas card recipients that get to enjoy my creative holiday endeavors are aware that I never make the same card twice. I usually start with a few general ideas: the Nativity scene, Santa Claus, bells, reindeer, holly, Bible verses… and then go on from there. I have boxes of old Christmas cards that get recycled into new ones. I get seasonally warm and wistful feelings when I read old cards from years ago that I haven’t recycled to make new cards with yet. Enough time has passed since I started doing this that some senders I haven’t heard from in many years, and some have passed away. But there, in my little box, are their seasonal well-wishes of yesteryear, that I take and make into new, festive paper creations.

Growing up, I truly loved ink stamps. I would revel in my ink pads, and a Carter’s (now Avery) brand re-inker. And this also carried over into my card-making. I try to take good care of my stamps – using only water-soluble ink most of the time, save for a few, metallic pigments. I wash them off after each use and leave them to dry. It also warms my holiday heart that the stationery supplier of my youth, Bailey Office Outfitters, has been operating for 100 years, in Ottumwa, Iowa.

A select few of my washed and drying rubber stamps

Before I moved to the UK, I managed to find some stamps from when I was likely about 10 years old, and I took them with me abroad. There were only about 10 of them – most were little foam squares of images like a cartoon Santa and a seated reindeer. I also found 2 or 3 more wooden stamps that were much larger and sturdier that were clearly from a Scholastic book order I’d made in school, of a snowflake and a snowman. I used them to make cards for years, in South London, and purchased many more as the years went by. I liked a chain of specialty crafting shops called The Works for its kid-friendly stationery, but I really loved Paperchase for its Christmas wares. In addition to their wooden-backed rubber stamp sets (sometimes in dedicated, branded aluminum cases) and multipacks of blank cards of many different sizes and colors, they had pre-printed Christmas pattern scenes on double-sided sheets of a heavy weight of paper. My favorite branch was right in the heart of Central London, near the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street - a mere stone’s throw from one of my favorite pub haunts. Paperchase went into administration in 2023 after I had relocated back to the States, and all their store locations disappeared, with their IP sold off. Thus, now there is an extra element of melancholy when I look at the paper, stamps, stickers, and cards that are left over from their shop of yesteryear.

Round stampers from The Works; my childhood cartoon stamps; and some square stamp sets from Paperchase

And speaking of ghostly reminders of times past: ghost stories are traditional at Christmastime in Britain. My spouse grew up watching the annual BBC ghost story for Christmas, and he continues the tradition of watching both their classic and new productions, each holiday season. Ghost stories at Christmas always seemed a little counter-intuitive to me as an American… this seeming more appropriate for the Halloween season. Ironically: fellow Iowegian Andy Williams sang about how “there’ll be scary ghost stories” at “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and it does give a little bit of historical background to A Christmas Carol to be aware of this spooky storytelling practice. (Shout-out to another fellow Iowegian, Meredith Willson, for the title to this article.) When I first arrived in Britain, I was on a study-abroad program, and part of the experience was a placement of each student with a local family – not for accommodation, but for acculturation. Some students met them once and never talked to them again, but I spent a lot of holidays and time off from classes with my host family. It was a husband and wife with a teenage daughter, and my host dad passed away many years ago, but I continued to send a Christmas card to my host mother. A couple of years back, it became obvious when my card bounced back to me some weeks into the New Year that she had probably died. I had not kept in touch with the rest of her family, so I have no way to confirm this. But I don’t regret sending her my paper well-wishes, for over twenty years. A beloved schoolteacher once told me that at midnight on Christmas Eve, the animals get the gift of speech. This is the closest folk tale I can think of a to Yuletide ghost story, when I was growing up. Maybe if I’m lucky, some departed loved ones - including that teacher and my host mum - will visit me if I go out to the barn this cold Christmas Eve… and maybe even thank me for sending my seasonal wishes to them so faithfully for so long.

The inside greetings from some of The Card Class of 2025

The last of my Christmas cards are going out this week, in envelopes all sealed with copious amounts of stickers. Have a great holiday season, all.

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