More Christmas

I have more Christmas Spirit this Christmas than ever before. It almost seems OCD-ish.

I think the reason for this total immersion in Christmas is because I'm not stressing over it. I stopped sending out cards years ago. That caused me entirely too much stress. This year I did not even do any Christmas shopping. I used to spend so much time trying to get people the perfect gift that would delight their socks off. I do have to send most of my gifting by mail and postage is outa sight. So I stopped at the few shops I know my family like to shop at and bought them all gift cards. Popped them in my handmade cards or stuffed them in a box and tied it up with ribbon and one of my handmade gift tags. And the postage for those very small packages was very minimal.

These are the things I've been having fun making. I'm a "maker". That's what makes me happy. When you're happy, there's not much room for stress.

I want to share with ya'll the cute gift tags and the Christmas cards. All of this paper-craft is totally personal.

These are some of the gift tags I made. The one on the left is an old photo of me and my sisters when we were tots. The other is a pic of me in my clown get-up

Here's a close-up of me and my sisters. I am on the right.

This is how they look on a present. I printed them out wallet sized, getting 9 pictures to a page. Then I cut them with a paper punch.

This is one of the cards I made. I made several different versions. This one is my house after a snow storm.

All of the cards I made have personal pics on them. Some of the pics, I edited aggressively with my photo

editing program (Picassa). I printed all the pics on off white card stock. I cut the card photos out with the      fancy scrapbooking scissors. Then glued them to red cardstock. One sheet of cardstock makes 2 cards. If I wrote a message inside, which I did, I do glue a piece of white plain paper, cut to fit inside the card. I write my message first then glue it. Otherwise I may mess up on an already glued in paper and be in deep trouble.

On the inside of the card, torn edge paper can be used. I have even used very faded sheet music on which to write my inside message. I do that by scanning the music, saving it to my photo file, then editing it so it appears very faded.

How do you feel about a handmade card versus a store bought card? Same question regarding gift tags. I feel like I'm giving a part of me away with something that I have thought about, planned out, designed, snipped, glued, altered, etc. I'm all over it. My fingerprints are on it and I'm sending it off with much love and attention.