Sending out holiday cards this year? Of course, if you want to be uber-green, you can send your holiday greeting electronically through sites like Care 2 or Blue Mountain. But if you or your kids like to give your cards a more personal touch, you might want to consider making your cards by hand.

 

For years, our version of homemade cards involved nothing more than scraps of construction paper and markers. They were always well-received by family and friends who appreciated the thoughtful, handmade holiday greeting. But now that my girls are a little bit older, they like to put a little more pizzazz into their holiday cards. So we took a tour around the Web to come up with some cool and creative ideas that are still easy on the wallet and the planet. Here are some of our favorites:

 

Kaboose is a great website for this kind of thing, and they didn't disappoint in the DIY holiday card category. Their site has a whole assortment of cool ideas, such as the Santa card pictured above, as well as a holiday wreath card made from scraps of paper, or a 3-D Christmas candles card made from empty toilet paper tubes.

 

Family Fun is another great craft site for kids. Their site offers great inspiration for holiday cards (I really like the cool cube card idea.) But my favorite post of all is not even a card, but a way to display the cards you receive using an inverted tomato cage. It makes a clever and creative Christmas conifer!

 

Our Big Earth also has some great ideas for easy, fun homemade holiday cards that you can make with your kids. Best of all, most of their ideas are so simple, you can whip up a whole batch of cards in one sitting. Now thats my kind of craft!