Cheap & Easy Photo Christmas Cards

Last year, I came up with what I think is a great way to save money on photo Christmas cards.  In the past, I have always been too cheap to spend $15 or more on photo cards, plus the cost of stamps.  Until last year, I had been buying boxed cards & adding a 4x6 picture of my kids inside.  Then, I realized, with the cost of cards & photos, I was spending about the same amount as I would on photo cards!  As I tried to problem solve a way to reduce my Christmas card costs, an idea hit me!

I placed my kids in front of the Christmas tree & desperately tried to get a good picture of them:

When I realized a "good" picture was not in our future, I told them to act silly & snapped some more pictures.  When I saw this picture, I knew it was the one:

{Not the greatest picture, but pretty funny!}

Then, I opened the photo in Picasa (a free photo editing download) and edited it in Picnik (which is part of Picasa's editing tools).

There, I messed with the effects, added a frame, & added text until I came up with this:

Then, I uploaded the picture to a local photo lab, which happened to have 4x6 prints on sale for ten cents each & picked up my "photo cards" one hour later!  They even threw in the perfect sized envelopes!  So, for about $5 I got 50 photo cards & envelopes!  (I'm curious to see if I'll get free envelopes this year too!  Otherwise, I'll just go buy some!)

I was pretty happy with my resourcefulness & we got a lot of compliments on our Christmas cards!

So, what do you think?  Have you ever tried this?