New Year, New Purpose!

I have two traditions for New Year's Day: The first is to gather all the Christmas cards and disassemble them. Fronts are carefully removed from the backs, unless they're photo cards, and neatly stacked. The insides, with the card sender's name(s), are punched and threaded onto a ring where they will reside with our Bible and devotional material at the kitchen table. 
Each morning, after breakfast, we have our devotions and then pray for the person or family on the top of the stack. We rotate through the stack throughout the year, flipping the card on top to the bottom and so forth. For us, this keeps the senders close all year long. This is not an original idea, I have blogged about this before. The idea came from friends years ago, Helen and Marv. They have both gone to their Heavenly home now, but we carry on in their spirit; we don't have cards in the stack from them anymore but they are always on our minds and in our hearts as we keep this tradition alive. So, what becomes of those stacked card fronts?

They are re-purposed into gift tags! I trim them into shapes, punch a hole and tie a ribbon for attaching to next year's gifts. I realized as I was doing this that this is a great activity for children. I should have done it over the weekend when the grands were here. Little ones love cutting, punching and threading the ribbon ties. I will remember that for next year, but I was on a mission to finish up the project up yesterday.

The second New Year's tradition is to transfer all dates and data from last year's calendar/planner into the new one. For the last five years I have given our daughter a planner for Christmas and she gives me mine. We let each other know in the fall which one we would like to receive and how we would like the cover to be personalized. Now, we both realize that we could order our own planners, but where's the fun in that?  It's exciting to unwrap our planners together each year! One year we both chose the same design; this year our daughter suggested three different designs and asked me to choose for her. 

These planners are big and roomy with pockets and folders too. I use mine incessantly, all in an effort to keep my life orderly and organized.  Some days I'm better at that than others. But, hey, it's a new year and I'm ready for it now; I'm always up for doing better than before and I can dream big too! 

Life is Good!