christmas in january.

Yes, it's true! Christmas is still alive and well here at our casita. We just love Christmas a bit too much to let it go. Our tree is down, garlands are stored, and presents have been well-used, but we still had one thing out: our Christmas cards. While I have loved letting Christmas live on for the past month, the truth is, I was waiting for those last "Happy New Year" cards to get in before I started brainstorming storage ideas.

Throughout the most joyous of seasons, our Christmas cards lived here...

 ...sitting in a cookie tin one of my sweet kiddos gave me for Christmas on our coffee table! We loved having our cards out and ready to be perused throughout the holiday! I mean, who doesn't love looking through all of the Christmas cards?! It's one of my favorite pastimes.

Using this tin worked perfectly for us this year because it did not take up a lot of space, all of the cards were corralled into one space, and the tin SCREAMS Christmas!

But since February arrives on Wednesday, it was time to start putting those pieces of eye candy away until next year. As I thought about ways to store our cards, I knew that I wanted the cards to be bundled together and to figure out some way to include the year on these cards so that in the future, when we pull out our Christmas cards, we can know when the little treasures were delivered. You know what that means: labels!!

After piddling around for a bit, I created this.

I know, it looks like a lemon meringue pie threw up on my label, but when it printed, the lemony green turned out a couple of shades darker = perfection. After throwing on a little cardstock backing and giving it a scalloped edge, we ended up with...

I decided to bundle the cards together using a binder ring. Although this meant having to punch a small hole in each card, I found that all of our cards had an area that could be punched without defacing the card. After punching holes in all of the cards, our Christmas Card Collection for 2011 will looks like...

All set! Now, I will probably throw them in a Ziploc bag to protect from scratches and tears and place our cards in our Christmas storage containers (a post on that will be coming up later!).

I am so looking forward to pulling these out again for Christmas 2012 and sharing our memories with friends and family! How do you store your Christmas cards from year to year? Did you have any fun displays this year?