13 Crafty Ways To Recycle Christmas Cards

Christmas greeting cards are fun to send and receive. We display our cards on the trim of the opening between our family room and kitchen. We don’t take down indoor Christmas decorations right after Christmas because we enjoy them! To avoid bad talk from our neighbors and HOA, we do take down our outside decorations!

When I do pack up the cards we received, I put them in a drawer of my china cabinet. Yes, I am a hoarder when it comes to things I think I might be able to use in a craft someday.

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Tile Coasters

An old standby craft for me is to make tile coasters. I have an older post here about how to create tile coasters using paper products. This year my stash of old Christmas cards came in handy. My siblings and I host a family Christmas reunion every Christmas. We use a church fellowship hall and decorate the room and tables. We also make small crafts for everyone to take home. For several years I have made over 50 coasters with the colors and theme of our decorations. Our theme this year was an old-fashioned family Christmas. To make the coasters for this year, I pulled out my cards from the china cabinet. I had some beautiful old-fashioned cards to work with, many with glitter.

As you can see, I had a good variety of colors and patterns which made really nice coasters!

Coasters are just one idea to reuse cards.

Other Ideas For Recycling Christmas Cards

Cards make very nice bookmarks. I don’t have any pictures of making them, but just pick the part of the card that has the best layout for a bookmark, cut it, use a hole punch to make a small hole, then thread ribbon through the hole. Easy peasy! They would make nice stocking stuffer gifts.

Using a 1 1/2″ or 2″ circle punch, you can make a cute garland for your mantle or Christmas tree. Go here for a picture tutorial on recycled paper garlands.

Making gifts in a jar? Use cards to create a jar topper. Cut a circle the size of your jar opening and put it inside the mason jar lid.

A money-saving idea is to make gift tags. Cut phrases or pictures from the card and store them with your Christmas wrapping paper. You have fancy and crafty gift name tags to use next year! If you have Christmas cookie cutters they can be used to trace a special pattern and make your cutting easier.

Make a cute and meaningful Advent calendar with Christmas cards.

Create some festive art by framing some of your beautiful cards. I love cardinals and have two 5X7 frames holding old Christmas cards of cardinals. I leave them out all year.

If you are into scrapbooking, Christmas cards will give you a lot of elements to work with!

A great idea is to make Christmas cards from old cards. This article gives great details on how to do this using old cards, cardstock, and basic crafting supplies.

Make ornaments to use or give as gifts. There are many options for making ornaments such as using wood circles or jar lids. You can also just cut them into circles or other shapes and add glitter or other embellishments.

If the card is a photo card it will be hard to reuse. What I do is scan the card into my computer and discard the card. You can do this with any of the paper cards that are sentimental to you, but you don’t want to keep. Another thing you can do with scanned cards is to create a photo book.

Use the back of the card for scrap notepaper.

Recycle your old Christmas cards into these crafty projects! #Crafts #ChristmasCards #Recycle Share on X

It’s possible that a local church or school can use the front of the cards for an art or craft project. Donate ones you don’t plan to use.

Most of my ideas here use basic craft items such as scissors, glue, or twine and the cards provide a free base for your project. Pretty good deal, especially when some of your cards are too pretty to just trash 🙂