I know. Halloween isn’t until the end of the week. But I already have designed, ordered and received my Christmas cards. Don’t hate me. Or judge me. I’ve been on the ball this year! (I already ordered the boys’ Christmas pajamas as well.) I want to help you get on the holiday ball as well. First, let me tell you my experience with Vista Print and our Christmas cards.

I knew a few things about our Christmas cards before I even began to look at designs.

• I wanted a photo card.
• I wanted to use pictures from our family vacation at the beach on those photo cards.
• I wanted something that wasn’t going to break the bank.

I turned to Vista Print because they’ve been flawless for me for almost three years now. I was thrilled when I saw that they offered two sizes of photo holiday cards (4×8 and 5×7). I decided to go with the 4×8 cards. Why? Slightly cheaper and personal preference. (As a side note, Vista Print also offers non-photo cards, postcards for your holiday party invitations and even cute caricature cards!) When I decided to go with the 4×8 cards, I was then overwhelmed with my options as to style. I could have designed my own but I didn’t quite know what went with our beach pictures.

In fact, that was my biggest dilemma. Our beach pictures are not exactly holiday oriented. No snow. No long pants. They’re by the water. In the sand. In shorts. With short-sleeved green shirts. And a blue sky. Thankfully, Vista Print doesn’t only offer your typical green and red card with a Christmas tree (though they have those as well). There were over 20 pages to click through. These are the options I most pondered when trying to pick our design.

The palm tree was fun but slightly cheesy. The brown with green  and the green with black were both great. But we eventually chose the last, more colorful option with the Christmas ornaments. It just felt bright and cheery and seemed to match our chosen photos the best. We chose six photos to include on this particular card, uploaded them, added our text and came up with these amazing cards.

(If you are on my Christmas card mailing list, forget you have seen this card and be really surprised when it arrives in your mailbox!)

I was thrilled with how they turned out. We put the verse from Luke that is found in Charlie Brown’s Christmas on the back of the card as our family loves that particular one, verse and movie alike. Voila! The perfect Christmas card! For a fraction of the cost of some other places. Hooray! It was easy to put together (just upload your photos, adjust them if they cropped them wrong, add your text and ship) and the quality is fabulous. Again, I’m just thrilled. I want to frame our Christmas card.

And we want to give you 50 free holiday cards from Vista Print as well! We’re giving away 50 free cards of your choosing (one design). Here’s how to enter.

1. Visit VistaPrint’s Christmas card section and browse around. Come back to this post and let me know in a comment which design you would choose if you won. (You are not limited to the 4×8 cards.) As a side note, you can change your mind on your design if you win. You may do this once.

2. Tweet about this contest by copy/pasting the following into your twitter stream: Win 50 holiday cards from @VistaPrint and @FireMom: http://bit.ly/2HTZ4F . You may do this as many times as your followers will tolerate.

3. Post about this giveaway on your public blog, linking back to this post. Please leave a comment with your post URL so I am sure not to miss it!

This giveaway will be live until Friday, November 6 at noon. It’s a few days shorter than my normal giveaways but I want the winner to be able to create their cards with enough time for shipping, addressing and mailing back out. The time is especially necessary if the winner doesn’t have photos for their card just yet! We will choose a random winner who will be contacted by email. The winner has 24 hours to reply or another winner will be chosen! (Rules: Limited to the US.)

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

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[Disclosure: I received my cards for free in exchange for this review.]

I love Vista Print. I do. I have loved them for the past two years. I have made birthday invitations, Christmas cards, business cards, calendars as gifts for grandparents and a series of other products. When I decided to throw my dad a surprise birthday party, I knew that I wanted to utilize Vista Print to print the invitations.

I’m glad I did. I wasn’t disappointed.

I do my invitations a bit differently than some people. I like to use their regular postcard, design my own (as the computer is the only place I’m remotely creative) and mail said postcards in their plain envelopes. We end up with extra this way as postcards come in packs of 100. However, for the party, we shared memories on the back of the extras and read them aloud. They are now keepsakes for my dad to have for the rest of his very long life. How did my postcards turn out? I designed them to look like this:

(Minus smudged out personal information.)

And they looked exactly like that. Vista Print has fabulous printing. It wasn’t pixelated. It looked exactly as it did on my screen. I was thrilled with that fact as were the people who received the invites. I just love having such a personal invite; pictures really make it look so much more awesome. Vista Print also offers their own designs on invitations, not just postcards. They help you out, of course, if you want to create your own design by offering the templates for each product size so you don’t go over the “full bleed” and “cut” sizes. It’s important not to cut off your words.

I’ll be honest: I have no desire to purchase products from any other printing company at this point. They’ve never let me down. I’ve experienced their wonderful customer service both online and off. (I once had a question and desperately needed an answer. I got it. Quickly.) Their prices are wonderful and they’re always having sales. Our family is a Vista Print family for life.

But no more surprise party invitations. Just regular ones. And Christmas cards. And other similar things. Just no more surprise parties. Okay? Okay.

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[I received this set of postcards for free in exchange of my honest review of their service and quality after the surprise party went off. Vista Print was kind enough to let me wait to post until after the party. After all, my family reads the blogs!]