Every year we send out a sheet of photos and our Christmas letter with our cards. I figure I might as well document it here:

To make the photo montage sheet I use a program called Comic Life. It’s super easy to use. I make the boxes then drop photos inside them. I can then scale the photos and they never grow outside the box. The paper was a harder problem. Regular photo paper is too thick, hard to fold and sometimes gets my cards sent back with insufficient postage. I found this lightweight photo paper that works well. You can also just make your image and hand it over to someone like shutterfly for them to mail it out which really would make things a lot simpler but doesn’t seem very personal to me.

I write the letter part as a group effort with the family, we can each edit and add our own flair to it.

I just use a google sheet for address labels. I add a column so I can sort them in furthest away first so those get sent first. The avery online label maker does a good job of mail merge from a csv file.

Finally I make a google drive folder named after the year under “Xmas Cards” where I put all the files for this year. I put both the original files and also the final print pdf files too.