Make Handmade Christmas Cards for Nursing Home Residents - The Holiday Project

Holidays are the times for connecting … with family…friends…the community at large. Many people are cut off from this connection due to health problems, advanced age, or other circumstances. The Holiday Project provides volunteers with opportunities to let people in need know that they haven’t been forgotten and to brighten their lives by brightening their day!

If you'd like to donate Christmas cards, you may drop them off, or mail them to:

Grace Care Center of Cypress

Attn: Donna Martin/The Holiday Project

9602 Huffmeister Rd

Houston, Texas 77095

(we need approx. 3,000 cards for Christmas Day - any amount of cards donated by an individual volunteer or group is appreciated!)

Card Guidelines:

In order to encourage creativity, very few guidelines are imposed on the making of Holiday Project handmade greeting cards. The cards may be almost any size, and the media used can be as simple as colored markers available at almost any grocery or drug store. Some people use combinations of media such as markers, rubber stamps, images cut from used or surplus store-bought greeting cards, cut-out computer-generated images, pasted bits of ribbon or felt, etc.

Here are a few general suggestions on other matters:
•Ideally the cards should be able to stand up if placed on a table, nightstand, etc.

•Please don't use glitter-on-glue. The glitter tends to get all over everything. However, pre-mixed "Glitter Glue" (such as is made by Crayola) is fine.

•Sentiments that imply that the recipients' circumstances are less than ideal (e.g., "Cheer Up!", "You are not forgotten", etc.) should be avoided.

•Greetings should be generic so that they can be appropriate to almost anyone. (For example, a Christmas card that says "Merry Christmas" on the front and "Wishing you all the joy of the season" inside would be fine. More specific religious content should probably be avoided however. Similarly, a Mother's Day card that says "Happy Mother's Day" and "The Best to You on this Special Day" would be fine, but sentiments such as "To a Great Mom" should be avoided, since not everyone visited in connection with Mother's Day has been a mother.)

•Please don't enclose or attach candy to the cards. (Logistically speaking, it's usually not practical for the visit-volunteers to separate out such cards and determine which recipients are permitted to have candy.)

•It's preferable that the cards not be in envelopes. (Some of the recipients suffer from advanced arthritis or other conditions that make the simple act of removing a card from an envelope quite difficult.)

•Please don't put a date on the cards. (We occasionally have a surplus of cards for a given occasion, in which case we simply pack up the excess cards and use them for the same holiday the next year.)

•Cards may be signed by the persons making them. Any signature should probably include just the signer's first name.

Questions - email Donna Martin at: theholidayprojecthouston@yahoo.com

Thank you very much for your act of kindness!

For more information about The Holiday Project go to www.holidayproject.org