A lot of time and decision making goes into picking a Christmas card, but once you’ve done so, you still have to address each envelope. While that can be a quick and easy process – depending on the speed of your handwriting – there’s also quite a bit of room for personal creativity, too. From choosing a fancy pen to coordinating your envelope colors, the options for addressing your holiday cards with some added style are endless.
Well, we say “endless,” but for this article, we’re only going to hone in on a couple. Below are our favorite ways to personalize envelopes, ensuring that your recipient is as awed by the packaging as they are by the card itself.
Try Zazzle’s Addressed Envelope Service
Of course, the quickest way to address your envelopes is with our free Guest Addressing. Think of this as a unique, creative solution to the hand-cramping task of labeling each piece of holiday mail you send. To avail of this service, choose an envelope design from our range of themed and officially licensed products. Add your own return address – this will be uniform across all of your envelopes, obviously, so you only need to enter it once. Finally, use the ‘Manage Guests’ button to address each envelope in turn.
To make things even easier in the run-up to Christmas, upload your contacts’ details – as you confirm them – to the Zazzle Connections Address Book. Then, when Christmas is a-coming, you can import those saved addresses onto your envelopes. Now you can impress everyone with that beautiful serif font you’d been pine-ing after and a Peanuts motif worthy of Charles M. Schulz himself.
Pick The Right Pen
If you’d rather set pen to paper when addressing your Christmas card envelopes, that’s understandable. Ditch that half-gnawed ballpoint this year and splash out on something luxurious – look for a pen with smooth ink flow and a comfortable grip. Whether you opt for a felt-tip pen, a gel pen, or even a dip pen, relish each swish and flick of the nib or brush. You can even address your envelopes with a festive-colored pen in red, green, or metallic gold ink.
Pro tip: While inky pens are fun to write with, they can be messy. Test the pen on scrap paper to avoid coating your finely crafted envelope in blots and smudges.
Try Your Hand at Calligraphy
Nothing makes a holiday card stand out like an ornately written address, and that’s why calligraphy is such a special art. If you’re up to the challenge of learning calligraphy yourself, watch some YouTube videos for advice on how to pick a nib, set up your workspace, and apply the best techniques. Each address doesn’t have to be perfect – a mistake in calligraphy isn’t the end of the word – but the extra effort you put in will make your holiday cards shine.
Pro tip: While you could hire someone to inscribe your envelopes, there’s something to be said for learning it yourself, too. If you’re particularly proud of your penmanship, why not offer the service to your friends or family for their holiday cards or wedding invitations?
Leave Your Mark with a Rubber Stamp
Though not quite as automatic as our addressing service, our rubber stamps speed up the process of marking each piece of post. For example, furnish a stamp template with your home address – and in that elegant, cursive font you love so much – and then reproduce it en masse across your Christmas cards! The result will be the same each time, and so with the right design, you’ll have a great tool for use on holiday cards, greeting cards, thank you cards, and many more occasions.
Pro tip: While a self-inking stamp will always print in the same color, a conventional rubber stamp has a separate pad that can be swapped out for different color variations. In either case, the sense of satisfaction that comes from authoritatively branding each envelope is hard to beat!
Choose a Festive Envelope or Envelope Liner
Feeling spent after your brush with calligraphy? Well, take a load off, and allow us to introduce our decorative envelopes and envelope liners. While blank white envelopes are included by default with each card type, why not opt for designed envelopes, created in conjunction with our brand partners and Independent Creators? Or, alternatively, use envelope liners as a way to spruce up the typically plain innards of your envelope and add a little extra weight to your package.
Pro tip: For best results, align the color scheme of your envelope or liner with that of the Christmas cards themselves. Save those color clashes for the ugly Christmas jumper party!
Seal the Deal with a Coordinating Sticker
By now, the front of your envelope is probably brimming with labels, stamped text, and calligraphy brush strokes, ensuring that your card will reach its sender. That makes the back of the envelope fair game – a blank template onto which you can affix a sticker. How about a vintage red truck, a beaming Santa Claus, or your home address in a clear but eye-catching font?
Pro tip: Again, coordinating products will yield the best results here. Once you’ve chosen your card, scroll down the product page to shop ‘Other products from this collection.’ Then everything will match, as if you’d planned it that way from the start (which of course you had).
Make an Impression with Wax Seals
In the olden days, wax seals were used to authenticate documents sent from one authority figure to another. In the twenty-first century, though, everyone has the option of wax seal stickers or wax seal stampers. Wax seal stickers are just like regular labels, pressed into place on the flap of your envelope – but the embossed ident and genuine wax used makes them look hot, hot, hot! If you don’t want a pre-made seal, customize a wax seal stamper instead. Applied with wax beads and with a melting spoon, you can create your very own branding!
Pro tip: There is a little coaching required to use wax seal stampers. For the very instructions you need, consult our article on “How to Use Wax Seal Stamps for Your Stationery – A Complete Beginner’s Guide.” Get some practice in and your worries will melt away!
When equipped with stickers, labels, and the ancient art of calligraphy, these envelopes won’t be discarded lightly! Instead of ripping open the envelope with wild abandon, they’ll delicately crack the seal, fawn over the envelope liner, and admire your newfound calligraphy skills. What other creative suggestions do you have for embellishing your envelopes? Let us know in the comments below!
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Eoin is a Content Specialist at Zazzle in Cork. He’s recently bought a house with his fiancée, and thus most of his time these days is spent trying to keep the walls from caving in and the wolves from the door. Still, he’s always open to book, game, and movie recommendations, so if you have some, let him know: he’ll add them to a very, very long list.
Such great ideas for addressing Christmas card envelopes.