Every December friends and family send you greeting cards. Perhaps coworkers send you greeting cards too and maybe even vendors like your insurance agent and your newspaper carrier. Maybe you also get greeting cards from business partners and customers. While everyone loves being thought of AT the holidays, you have to decide AFTER the holidays what to do with these greeting cards.

There are two good reasons to save greeting cards sent to you. If these two reasons aren't applicable to you and you save all of your greeting cards, then you're saving clutter. So if your goal this new year is to get organized at home, start here and start now with these greeting card organization tips.

First, save greeting cards with sentimental value to you. That means you do NOT have to save greeting cards from all of those other nice people who sent you holiday greetings. Really, you don't. That includes the greeting cards and holiday post cards with real family photos that are so popular. You don't have to keep portraits of other people's families and pets that have no sentimental meaning to you.

The keywords are "sentimental value". By all means do put holiday postcard photos of your grandchildren in frames or in your photo album. Just cut the photo out of the card or postcard. But you don't have to keep the ones of your coworker's toddler or the holiday postcard portrait of your newspaper delivery person's family. Tip: If you have to ask "who are these people" or "what's his/her name" more than once in a year, it's probably not sentimental to you. It may be a cute photo card, but it's still not of sentimental value. It's simply clutter after the new year starts. Discard it.

The second reason to save greeting cards is if you plan to use the greeting cards in craft projects. This reason may have nothing to do with sentimental keepsakes discussed above. For instance, the card may have a great photograph or drawing of Santa. Make it into an ornament. Clip the Santa portrait with scissors (trash the rest of the card); use a single hole puncher to put one hole at the top of Santa's picture; string yarn, thread or a hook through the hole; hang your new Santa cardboard ornament on your Christmas tree or on a "clothesline" of yarn along with other holiday cutouts. That's just one simple ornament idea. You can probably think of lots more ideas.

For instance, you can give the cards to your children to cut into paper dolls, paintings for their doll house walls or to put into collages. It's fun amusement for them. When they're finished, trash anything they don't want to keep playing with. But whatever you do, don't keep all of those holiday greeting cards because you MIGHT do something crafty with them one day. If you don't have a specific idea now with a timeframe for doing the project, don't save the greeting cards. If you need more ideas for using or organizing greeting cards that you'd like to keep, see the list of greeting card organizer tips at http://www.EasyHomeOrganizing.com.