I started on our family Christmas card pile during Thanksgiving weekend. My daughter was home from college for the holiday weekend, and during that time we rushed through a lot of errands that required her input or participation.

One of our family customs is that we send out a lot of greeting cards, and all three of us individually signs every card.

So I got the Christmas card list made, composed the holiday newsletter with husband’s and daughter’s input, and addressed and folded the cards. Daughter took a stack of cards with her back to school so she could make deliveries, and we have a big stack at the house waiting for a trip to the post office later this week.

It’s been pretty consistent for us in recent years in that the entire family sends out about 65 cards; and daughter sends about 15 additional cards to other people she personally knows. That’s a pretty big pile to send out when stamps are 41 cents a piece.

So, how and why do we keep to what some see as an archaic, time-consuming and expensive tradition?

Here is our thinking on this:

• There are a lot of relatives whom we see on a regular basis throughout the year. It is appropriate to send Christmas greetings to those relatives. So even if we took off the cousins seen only at weddings, funerals and family reunions, we still have a big list of people who should get cards.
• Some relatives get annoyed if they do not receive a card on occasions that call for it. (I think every family has at least one relative who is like this!) But why should we give a card only to the ones who expect it? What about another family member who holds the same rank? She gets a card too, and so does that relative …
• We don’t spend much on Christmas and birthday gifts, so the expense of buying and sending greeting cards is not a big deal.
• There are friends who, because we have moved, they have moved, or both, we no longer see but at one time were a very big part of our lives. Christmas cards are an excellent time to say “We still remember you!”

So if Christmas cards are part of your family tradition, how do you keep this to a manageable budget and amount of effort? Here are six tips:

• Buy your Christmas cards either at the end of the season, or when they first get placed in the stores. You’ll find your best prices at those times. The cards I am sending out this year were picked up for a rock-bottom price just after Christmas 2006, and I stored them off-season in a box of Christmas decorations.
• You can try to handcraft your greeting cards. I do handcraft all the birthday, get well and sympathy cards my family sends out during the year. There also were two years when I handcrafted Christmas cards with a pretty rubber stamp design, but that project took up way too much time. Besides, if you shop carefully (see above) you can find pre-printed holiday cards cheaper than you would pay for blank cards at the craft store.
• Save the pre-printed address labels that non-profit groups send you as charity appeals to use on the stack of Christmas cards. If you wish, you can send a donation back to the sponsors. But you are under no obligation to send the charity a donation for those labels unless the individual label or sticker includes the agency’s logo. (In which case, if you don’t want to support the cause, throw out the labels.) I received four such packets in recent weeks, three of which included holiday designs. They were used on our cards.
• Select the right paper for your Christmas newsletters. I uses pretty newsletter paper in 2005, but soon realized those paper packs can cost as much as the box of cards. If you are sending a family newsletter in lieu of a card, the pre-printed paper is a nice touch. But if you are enclosing a newsletter inside of a card, the newsletter can be printed on everyday (cheap!) computer / copy paper.
• If you send e-cards via the Internet to avoid the cost of postage, limit that list to those whom you know enjoy that form of communication and have a computer system that can handle the singing and dancing and video antics that are typically found on e-greeting sites. Friends or relatives who are using a slow dial-up Internet service or a computer that’s one or two technology generations behind yours may have a hard time viewing the e-card as it was meant to be seen.
• Always keep at least one unaddressed card as reserve. We usually set aside three or four cards. There is always someone we forgot to put on the list the first time, or who sent us a card that we’d like to reciprocate, or someone who moved and we didn’t find out until the old address was written out. You can keep these extra cards from year to year with holiday decorations or greeting card box. Or, if you want to use up all the leftover cards once your list is done, send them to a teacher, a pastor, a nursing home resident ….