Recycling for Good: A Reminder

Hi all!  Have you recycled your holiday cards yet this year?  We just gathered up our photo-less cards and addressed them for St. Jude’s.

Here’s last year’s post with more information.

Note:  St. Jude’s takes every kind of greeting card, not just those from Christmas!  If you have birthday cards, thank you cards, Mother’s Day cards – whatever! – that you’ve received and don’t feel quite right about throwing out, here’s a great way to have them reused.  If you’d like to keep the sentiments inside, just send along the front half of the card.  That’s the part they use, anyway.

Christmas Card Guilt

I LOVE holiday cards.  One of my favorite parts of the Christmas season is going to the mailbox every day and seeing how much my friends’ kids have grown, reading the holiday letters from extended family, and seeing how my seventh grade teacher is doing.  (She retired this year and is taking golf lessons in 2010!)

I take great effort to create our own holiday card.  I make it a little different each year, spending hours fiddling in Photoshop Elements, shopping bargains on the photo printing sites, and hand-addressing each card.

However, I have a dirty little secret.

Every January, every card we’ve received goes into the recycling bin.

I tried to save them for a few years.  I really did.  But it got to be a huge space-taker, and one day shortly after realizing we had too much stuff for our space, I threw them all out.  Every January, I feel a twinge, but they still go into the bin, because honestly?  I’m going to get new ones next year (yay!), and we really do have more stuff than space.

This year, however, I’m making a change.  The cards without photos are going here.  For the price of a couple of stamps, I am recycling these gorgeous cards in a very eco-friendly way and at the same time contributing to the care of some very deserving kids.

Will you join me?