Running the card list
Sending cards is a logistics job dressed up as goodwill — addresses to chase, a pile to write, a pile to post. The card list keeps the whole thing tidy from one year to the next.
Add your contacts
Add each person or household you send cards to, with a name and a postal address. It's a one-off job — you're building a contact book that carries forward every year afterwards, not re-typing addresses each December. Addresses are encrypted at rest, so even inside a shared household account, that private information is protected rather than sitting about in plain text — worth knowing before you type in Great Aunt Mabel's full address.
You can add a relationship note too — "Mark's side," "school parents," "next door" — which makes the list easier to scan once it's grown past a couple of dozen names, which it inevitably will.
Track sent and received, per season
Every season starts the card list fresh, with three columns for each contact:
- To send — on the list for this year
- Sent — tick it once it's in the postbox
- Received — tick it as cards land on your own doormat
It's a small thing, but it answers the one question that always comes up at the worst moment — "did we send the Hendersons a card this year?" — without anyone having to remember, or dig through last year's diary for a clue. Whoever's nearest the postbox can tick things off as they go; the list stays accurate for everyone in the household, not just whoever wrote it.
Archiving folk without losing history
People move, drift, or simply stop exchanging cards, and that's fine — archive their entry rather than deleting it. Archived contacts drop out of next season's default list, so you're not stuck writing to someone you've lost touch with, but every previous year's sent and received ticks stay exactly as they were. Nothing about your card history disappears; it just stops asking for your attention until you choose to bring it back — handy for the year someone reappears after a quiet decade.
The print and export run
When it's time to actually write the cards, run the print or export in one go — the full contact list, or just the ones still marked "to send" if you're working through a stack in stages. It's built for the kitchen table: addresses lined up and ready, so writing cards becomes an evening's job rather than a weekend excavation of last year's Christmas cupboard. Export whenever you like, delete whenever you like — your address book stays yours.