Christmas Cards

Last year I made an impulse purchase at Costco in the form of a box of Christmas cards. They looked so very pretty, and they appealed to my scrapbooking nature because some of the elements were cut-outs that were raised off the page; so cute! I didn't get around to sending them last year (probably because of school, or something) so I still had them when this year came around. I even still had the ornament paper I had bought for typing up the Christmas letters last year. So I got my behind in gear this season, getting our letter typed and printed out. Yeah! Then I went though all my addresses in Outlook, updated some of them, and went through the process of learning how to do a Mail Merge so that the computer would take them straight from Outlook and print them prettily on my envelopes. Nothing doing. The envelopes are of a nice heavy paper that feels really nice to me, but makes my printer insist that it has a paper jam. I hand-addressed my cards. That's okay, I can handle that. It just made my entire Mail Merge effort a waste of time, though. Then Kellen and I folded letters, added pictures, stuffed and sealed envelopes, and applied stamps. All ready to go, right? Next day I took them to the post office where I was informed that they were too thick to take a standard stamp (remember those raised cut-outs?), they would require another 56 cents per envelope. So I have to use different cards and I can't move the stamps to new envelopes because if they can tell you've done that they won't mail it. Ugh! I bought new cards at Wal-Mart and yesterday morning I stood over a boiling tea kettle steaming open all of my envelopes so that I could remove the cards, put the letters and pictures in new cards, and re-seal them in the same (now slightly wrinkled) envelopes. My cards finally went out yesterday afternoon. Good grief! So this was a lesson very well-learned; I will stick with simple, ordinary cards in the future. So, for those of you who are getting cards from us this year, these are the ones I had picked out to send and wasn't able to. And now I am very glad that the Chaos of Cards is done for this year!