Create Your Own Vintage Christmas Cards This Holiday Season

Amid the colored lights, the ornament tree, the snow, and the winter colds, Christmas is special because it is a period where families come together and share many things — their experiences over the year, engagements in family activities, and dining together.

Gifts, note cards, and holiday photo cards are a major part of the Christmas culture for families worldwide. This article will share ideas and processes for making your own vintage Christmas cards. Vintage style and retro Christmas cards are a buzzing, popular trend at the moment and can be a fun twist on the usual (and sometimes tedious) Christmas card-making process! But there are lots of other benefits to this twist, also.

Why Make DIY Vintage Christmas Cards This Year? 

Most extended families are a mixture of the old and new generations; therefore, engaging in a vintage Christmas card-making activity can help the older generation recollect their time of youth and profound energy; and it helps the newer generation get an insight into how things were in the earlier years.

Although it is evident that making the Christmas greeting cards yourself could be time-consuming, we think these benefits are well worth it!

1. It serves as a medium of interaction between you and your family, especially for older children who can help gather the materials needed for making the cards.
2. The process is educational, and crafters skilled in card-making can teach those who don’t know the process. It also allows for a manifestation of creativity as the children engage in the cards' design and decoration. 
3. Handmade holiday greeting cards mostly come at a minimal financial cost, since most of the materials that are used in the process are common household materials. The only things that may need to be purchased are the decorations and glitter that are required for special effects with the cards — and many of these can be purchased fairly cheaply on amazon.
4. They’re ethically friendly. Making DIY vintage Christmas cards is a very efficient means of recycling items. The majority of the materials used may be destined for the waste bin; however, with card making and other DIY Christmas crafts, it is possible for some of these items to be used and recycled.
5. As said earlier, it gives young children an insight into how Christmas was celebrated back in the ‘good old days.’ For example, this Greetings Card Universe template shows how a medieval family might have celebrated the Christmas holiday. The idea of an ‘antique Christmas’ or ‘vintage holiday’ can be exciting for all the family and can also serve as a more general Christmas theme that can inspire home decor, holiday gifts, thank you note cards, and more!

Materials for Creating Vintage Christmas Cards 

Since a holiday card could be made of or contain almost anything, the focus when making a vintage Christmas card would be items that were trendy in the vintage years, such as 

• Colored cardboard or paper. White paper usually won’t do the trick unless it’s painted or designed with a retro feel.
• Empty card stock
• A black and white photograph, especially if it is an old family photograph.
• Photographs with excessive RGB exposure
• Generic photographs, such as those with a Christmas tree, a snowman, or Santa Claus
• Old denim materials and cloth materials
• Tea bags for staining photographs to give them that victorian, retro Christmas card look
• Silhouettes
• Stickers
• Paintings;
• essentially anything that could invoke nostalgia!

For example, check out this vintage card from Greeting card universe of an old cottage with snow-covered roof and Christmas decorations.

Tips and Tricks for Creating Vintage Christmas Cards 

Whatever holiday you are celebrating this year, whether it’s Hanukkah, Christmas, Xmas, or otherwise, these tips and tricks for vintage greeting cards will go down a treat for any recipient.

• The cards can be made from seemingly modern materials; you’ll need to decorate them to appear retro to fit into the theme! For example, summer pictures could serve as inspiration for your own family pictures. If well-edited and decorated, they would give you fantastic material that you can print and use to make a proper vintage card.
• An essential part of the card should be the message to the person the card is intended for. Apart from the season greetings to them, you could include a poem, an old verse of music, or a quote that would fit into the vintage theme of the card. 
• Vintage cards come in different forms and sizes; they could be conventional foldable cards with a personalized message inside. Or it could be designed as an old-timey postcard. You could even go for the retro-modern blend, and attach your vintage card to a fridge magnet. 
• Consider making a matching envelope for your vintage Christmas card.

How to Make a Simple DIY Vintage Christmas Greeting Card 

We’ve created our own simple instructions for making an easy vintage Christmas card:

1. Get a card stock or a card template. Find a family photo from a family album or scrapbook, preferably in black and white. If you don’t have any black-and-white or sepia-colored photos, simply change the settings on your phone to edit the photograph and get it reprinted. Or, if you have printed photographs you want to use, you can consider tea staining them to give them even more of an aged, mid-century look!
2. Make decorative cuts on the cards to give them circular or curved edges. This can be done using a Cricut machine or scissors.
3. Glue the photo to the card. Scraps of denim or any form of cloth material could be used to cover rough edges and perhaps painted to make a Christmas wreath.
4. Use small Christmas ornaments to create embellishments on the front cover to give a glittering look.
5. On the back of the card, you can carefully use watercolor to paint a poinsettia or a holiday greeting in decorative fonts.
6. Create tiny dots using a white watercolor to give the effects of falling snowflakes. 

More Christmas Card Ideas 

1. Crafty DIY designs can be employed for almost anything when gifting during the Christmas season. For example, gift tags or gift wraps can be made instead of purchased! 
2. Feeling stuck creatively? Here’s a free printable Christmas gift card from Family Education!
3. Although quite elaborate, this Christmas tree card design from Shelterness can be beautifully replicated. 
4. As your Kids leave school for the holiday season, you can help them present this Christmas card to their teachers. It has a space for a personalized message to them.