It’s that time of year where we wrestle the Christmas tree down, tangle up the lights for next year and pack up the ornaments. The Christmas holidays are officially over.

This year, I was pretty timely in my clean up and  have only found a few holiday stowaway pine needles throughout the house. I am not sure how they even got into the bathroom!? However, I am left with one gorgeous pile of Christmas cards and as you may know — I love PHOTOS.

So, each year I save the photo cards and create a scrapbook spread to end our family annual album. This way, we get to see how these families have grown and changed, just as ours has, throughout the years. I am thrilled the current trend of  photo cards is still in favor.  As I thankfully have a quite a bit to work with, I cut down the cards to focus only on the photos so that I can work them into a couple of cohesive layouts. (I love that I usually need more than 2 pages… keep the cards a coming!) Sometimes I simply go with a collage  layout or sometimes a bit more structured, like the samples pictured below:

If scrapbooking isn’t your thing, I have also seen quite a few different ideas on how to save or recycle these cards.

Pinterest provides a few different ideas from snapping a photo of each card to use as your contact photo on your phone, cutting down to make smaller gift cards to reuse, photo keepsake albums and seasonal decorations.   Below are a few of my favorites: