As much as Christmas and the holidays are a time of gift giving and receiving, they are also a time of waste. According to an article from The Independent, more than a billion Christmas cards are dumped and burned every year.

However, there are many ways we can recycle these holiday cards instead of simply throwing them away:

1. You can send them to St. Jude's Ranch, a non-profit home for youths that reuses old holiday cards.
2. Make Christmas ornaments out of the old cards.
3. Make your old cards into gift tags by cutting them up and applying a hole punch through them with ribbon.
4. Make placemats out of old cards by cutting up the images and pressing them together between contact paper.

Personally, I like to take some of my favorite Christmas card images and put them in little frames as Christmas decorations for next year.