The Christmas Card List You Won’t Have to Check Twice

Need an easy, efficient way to manage Christmas mail?
We love our Mini Binder Christmas Mail List Tracker printables for this Holiday task.
Post updated October 2023

Traditional Christmas cards aren’t going away any time soon, no matter what the technology industry or modern trends tell us.

Christmas greeting cards make up a whopping 61% of all holiday cards sent.  Valentine’s Day is second, at 25%.  Hubspot.net says over 2 billion paper Christmas cards are mailed in the US each year, and that compares to 500 million e-cards.  Yes!!!  Paper Love wins!!

So how do people keep track of who gets a Christmas Card and who doesn’t?  Do you cross people off your to-send list if they don’t send you a card?

Our Christmas Card List has changed quite a bit over the years.  We used to mail just as many cards to friends as to family.  That balance has really changed as the years have passed.  Now our family list is about 3 times longer than our friend list.

On the other hand, our client Christmas Card List has grown every year.  We have some clients we’ve sent cards to for twenty years!  And yes, we seem to keep adding more to the list than we ever take off.  Our list for clients currently has about 75 names on it.  That’s a lot of cards to make!

And a lot of names and addresses to track.

The Evolution of Our Personal Christmas Card List Tracker

For years I had a mini-binder that I used as an address book.  It was super effective, as long as I wrote in pencil.  Some addresses got erased so many times that I had to start a new section for them.  Other addresses and phone numbers would stay the same for 20 years.

My next method of list keeping was Excel spreadsheets.  One spreadsheet for friends and family, and one for clients.  This also worked great for years.  It was super easy to keep up with address changes this way, keeping them in alphabetical order and/or making other changes.

Then a really handy disc came into my possession in the 1990s.  It kept track of addresses, groups, birthdays, sorted according to any number of requirements, and was just the greatest digital address keeper ever.  It could print envelopes with addresses, batch by batch.  Along with the return address.  This was state-of-the-art, get-er-done fast mailing.

Until Google came along. Will anything ever surpass Google for keeping track of your whole life?

I’m not sure I totally love all that keeping track and syncing and knowing what I’ve been reading and shopping for.

But if it means a quick and easy method of Christmas Card Listing, then I’m first in line.

Our Mini Binder Christmas Card List Tracker

Since we prefer paper planners versus digital, our Mini Binder Holiday Organizer printables are our favorite way to keep track of Christmas planning.

This is our 2023 Coffee Christmas mailing list tracker:

This is a multi-year list.  You can keep track of who you sent cards to, and who you received them from for 5 years!  (Fill in the “S” block for sent and the “R” block for received.)  So, so simple.

The Google Contacts Christmas Card List

Confession here.

This is actually the first year I am going to try using our contact lists to get our Christmas cards out.  That means I’ll have to update all our contacts.  No first names and phone number only.  If I want to use the contact list as a mailing list to send Holiday cards, I have to enter/update all the addresses and put them on a designated list.

But it is so fast once you get it set up. You start entering the address, and Google immediately guesses where in all of the United States this address will be and you just have to click the right one and you’re done!

Here’s what your screen looks like when you enter addresses and update a contact list:

So as you can see, I have the tab opened to our Google Contacts.  In case you’re a newbie at this like I am, I’ll try to give you a step by step here.  This is for your PC, using a mouse and all that easy stuff.  It’s not for tablets or phones.  That’s another ballgame, but not very different, really.  If you can do this, you can do it on other devices.

9 Steps to Creating a List from your Contacts list:

1. On the Google homepage, up where your email is, click on the dotted square.
2. Pick “Contacts” from the drop down menu.
3. As you scroll down the list, hover over the button on the left of the names you want to pick.  A little box will show up that you can tick.
4. Tick all the boxes for the contacts you want on any certain list.  I have two family lists, one for his and one for mine.  A third list is for Clients.
5. So you have all the boxes ticked for a list.  Now go up to the top right and click on the sideways tab shape, and it will say “manage labels.”  If you have a current list, click on that list to add all the ticked boxes of people to that list.
6. If you create a new list with the ticked boxes, go to the bottom where it says “Create New List” and type in the name of your new list.
7. Go ahead and put all the people you want to send Christmas cards to into a list.
8. Now click on your Christmas Card List, and go through all the contacts and update addresses.
9. That’s it.  Now you can click you list, and pick each contact on that list to find the address for their Christmas Card envelope.  I usually highlight and copy the addresses and paste them into a document so that I can use special fonts, etc. to print out the envelopes.  If you know of a way to print envelopes from your Google contact list, please share with us.

Happy Christmas Card Listing to you all…