Create Your Own Holiday Cards

New Ideas And Easy Tools You Can Use

(CBS)  Everyone loves to get them, and every year someone seems to up the ante. Americans are poised to send nearly 2 billion holiday cards this year, according to the Greeting Card Association.

Hallmark says the average American household will send and receive about 30 cards. Digital photography and the Internet has revolutionized and streamlined the process. Regina Lewis, AOL's online adviser and author of the best-selling book "Wired in a Week," has some ideas on how to make holiday cards and other correspondence more creative and convenient.

Homemade Cards
Once you have a favorite photo, you need to get it onto your computer, so you can get to the good part. There are a few different ways to do this:

• If you have a digital camera, which have really become easy-to-use and have also come way down in price, plug it into your computer and the photos instantly transfer to your computer's hard-drive.
  
  
• If you have a scanner, you can scan a picture, a drawing, a piece of art, whatever you choose in seconds. You can also take your photo to the nearest Kinkos and they'll scan it for you and put in on a disk. Take the disk home, pop it in your computer and you’re good to go.
  
  
• If you haven't graduated to the digital camera yet or don't have a scanner, you're still in luck. Ask your photo developer to digitize your pictures when you drop off your film for processing -- just check the box.

Now that your chosen image is on your computer, you can easily make some basic greeting cards. All you need is a color printer. These are fairly affordable and start at about $100 bucks.

Those drawings your kids bring home from school, those are fair game for Holiday cards, take them off the fridge and scan them!

If you want to get a little more elaborate, you can take a handful of digital pictures and arranged them into a photo collage. All you need to do this is an easy to use photo software like Microsoft Picture It widely available at electronics stores for less than $30.

To get the best print quality, you want to buy good stock paper and/or photo quality paper. They also pre-sell it for greeting cards with a fold in the middle.

If you keep it simple, you can save money by doing your greeting cards like this at home. There's quite a range in paper costs and quality. You can pay as much as $1.00 per sheet for glossy photo quality greeting card paper or as little as 10 cents per sheet for a lesser quality paper. You're best bet is to probably fall somewhere in the middle.

Paper Examples:
If you go with a premium photo greeting card paper, you can pay as much as $1.00 per card. HP Glossy Greeting Card Paper, 8.5 inch x 11 inch, 10 Sheets

A nice felt textured paper with a fold down the center (includes envelopes) runs about 50 cents per sheet. So, you could have 40 cards for about $20. Felt textured Greeting Cards, Paper Size: 8.5 inch x 11 inch; folds to 5.5 inch x 8.5 inch , 20 sheets/envelopes

If you go with a lesser quality paper, you can pay as little as 10 cents per sheet. Greeting Card Kit for InkJet Printers, 5.5 inch x 8.5 inch, 50 Sheets

Tip: When you're doing this at home, go for a few trial runs using regular paper so you can be sure everything is lined up the way you want it. Then, make sure your printer settings are set to "best" or "presentation" quality. Most printers by default are set to "normal" or "average" print quality. Setting it to the highest quality will use a little more ink, but you'll get the results you're looking for. Load the good paper and you're off to the races. Once you get the first one done, the rest go quickly.

You can also use photo printers to makes printing digital photos a no hassle, fun and rewarding experience. Try SonyStyle USA - DPP-EX5.

Option #2: Have someone else do the work for you.

One-Stop Shopping Sites
Now that you have the photo on your computer, the first thing you need to do on any photo site is upload your photo. Shutteryfly.com is one way to go. If you have high-speed or broadband Internet access, you're really in business and this will go quickly. If you don't, you can expect this to take about 10 minutes or so per image.
How to do it:

• Upload photo
  
  
• Pick a border
  
  
• Write a personal message and greeting. You can even get a choice of fonts
  
  
• Enter the addresses you want the cards sent to; by the way, this will come in handy when the next holiday card season rolls around because you can choose to have your address list stored on the site.
  
  
• Lastly, you can even pick the stamp! If you order your cards today, they'll ship tomorrow via U.S. Mail and be in mailboxes by the middle of next week. Wouldn't that be a nice thing to have off your weekend yo-do list? Keep in mind you can also have the cards sent to you first and you can personalize them, address them, stamp them yourself. It's totally your call.
  

Once you have your photo or photos on the site, you can easily order photo gifts like: note cards, snapshot book, photo calendars, framed prints and other great gifts. The quality is amazing.

When you choose the one-stop-shopping option, it's less about saving money and more about convenience. And that comes at a pretty big premium this time of year. Generally for 50 cards you're looking at 1.50 each + stamps at .37 cents a pop. Depending on how fancy your cards usually are, the price is in range with buying packs of cards, ordering multiple prints of the photo you want to use and doing it the old fashioned way.

Notes To And From Santa
You can email Santa at emailsanta.com or at AOL Keyword: Santa and he'll write you back. He gets thousands of emails every day!

Also, if you want to receive a note from Santa in the mail, you can create a letter (remember you might want to use your computer for this, since familiar handwriting and Santa don't mix!) and send it in a self-addressed/stamped envelope to Alaska and the U.S. Postal Service will postmark it from the North Pole and send it back. Send to/Chyron: Christmas Cancellation, Postmaster 5400 Mail Trail, Fairbanks, Alaska 99709-9999.

Last year, they received over half-a-million requests for Santa's North Pole postmark and they're expecting more requests than that this year! If you want to do this, you need to mail your letters right away, as they have to be in Alaska by Dec 15.

Thank You Notes
A big draw for digital photography is instant gratification. There's nothing better than taking pictures of the kids Christmas morning and being able to share them with friends and family almost instantly. Here's an example from AOL's "You've Got Pictures:" Kailee Christmas Morning. If you've got a digital camera, or if you get one under the tree, doing this will cost you nothing. It costs nothing to share your photos or send an email around the world.


According to a recent Sony Electronics/Harris Interactive poll of parents and chidren:

• Mothers are significantly more interested than fathers in creating e-cards and interactive holiday letters
  
  
• Girls are also significantly more likely than boys to be interested in
  creating digital family photo albums, e-greetings or interactive family letters with their parents than by themselves
  
  
• E-cards for the holidays are more popular among parents in the Midwest
  than in the East coast

Additional links:
www.snapfish.com
www.imagestation.com