Pro Tip: Repurpose Your Holiday Cards And Crack All Your Friends And Family Up

Don’t throw them out, get creative with them instead

Christmas cards are one of those timeless holiday traditions that can’t help but become something of a chore. If you’re sending them out, you have to buy them in bulk, or, even worse, you have to wrangle your family into taking a picture to plaster on top of it.

When you receive them, your mantle or your archway gets flooded with well wishes from family, friends, acquaintances, and people you forgot to send one to and now have to pray you have a card or two left for.

One ingenious dude came up with a clever way to justify the tradition.

Recycling.

By the end of December, the house is littered with Christmas cards. Come January 2nd, they all go in the trash. But what if they didn’t have to?

Joe Heenan came up with a solution to the holiday greeting card clutter that plagues us all, and not only does it help the environment, it’s also hilarious. He posted his brilliant idea on Twitter, and the internet supports him 100%.

He’s taking the cards he received and, instead of using the as kindling during the bomb cyclone, he’s repurposing them! Joe grabbed a pen and with a little creative tweaking, he’s transformed the usually quickly-obsolete holiday messages in the cards to greetings that can be used for all manner of different occasions.

A “silent night” card is transformed into a “congrats on your new baby” card with some strategic editing: “You won’t get a lot of SILENT NIGHTs after your baby arrives.”

A bucolic photo of a couple walking in a snowy landscape becomes a message about tolerance when Joe overlays a “Congratulations on your same-sex marriage” message onto the card.

The woefully overlooked demographic of people who pass their driver’s test is finally given its due when Joe alters a “three wisemen” Christmas card to offer kudos to those who’ve triumphed at the DMV.

The tweet with the doctored cards has nearly 50,000 likes and over 17,000 retweets.

I don’t use the word “genius” very often, but Joe Heenan is clearly a genius. And Twitter agrees.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/948207294516523008

Several people have already jumped onboard the brilliant idea, using old Christmas cards…

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/948521966956314624

Birthday cards…

Even Frankensteining together Valentine’s Day cards like some kind of deranged greeting card ransom note:

Others made it clear that Joe isn’t the first one to come up with this gambit:

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/948653052604682245

Nothing says “great idea!” like finding out grandparents have been doing it for years. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to retrieve some cards from the fireplace…