Sending personalized cards to all your friends and family members is a wonderful way to spread joy and let everyone know you wish them well during the holiday season. It’s also a great opportunity to share some updates on your life, your family, special moments, and milestones from the past year.
A traditional way to share your news is to write a letter and tuck copies into your holiday cards. This is a thoughtful gesture, but it’s pretty time consuming during one of the busiest seasons of the year. As a fun, easy, updated alternative to an annual letter, create custom year-in-review holiday cards with Mixbook.
Our year-in-review Christmas card templates are expertly designed to exude holiday cheer and make it super-easy to recap the year with all your highlights and big news. Plug in your favorite photos and follow the prompts, and your cards will be ready to send! Check out our top five year-in-review cards, and remember that everything is fully customizable in Mixbook Studio™.
Related: Why holiday cards matter more than ever
Modern Year in Review
The Modern Year in Review card offers a straightforward template with a horizontal arrangement of four square photo spots on both the front and back. The neat typography on the front includes the year and a line for your family name, with a header and caption box under each photo. The aesthetic is timeless and elegant, with a classic serif font, black-on-white color scheme, crisp linear accents, and a confetti-speckled border for a hint of holiday sparkle.
For a family of four, this formatting is ideal for offering a brief update about each family member. You might also feature favorite pics and highlights from each season, or choose four themes such as home, travel, career, and hobbies.
Chalkboard Year in Review
Chalkboard Year in Review is one of our most popular year-in-review Christmas cards. Mixbookers love the charming white-on-slate chalkboard aesthetic and grid layout that equally balances photos and text elements. Hand-drawn arrow motifs and an attractive script font for the headers add to the appeal of this design.
The front of the card features three photo spots, each accompanied by a text box with a header and series of bulleted lines. Customize these with brief summaries of your own year. The prompts suggest “highlights,” “milestones,” and “travel” categories, but you get to edit the text to suit your own adventures. For the back of the card, choose one favorite photo of your whole family and write your custom holiday greeting.
Rustic What a Year
The Rustic What a Year holiday card is perfect for a cheerful review of the past year’s best moments. A crisp white card with a subtle, rustic paint-strokes pattern and fun, modern font pairings make this card a versatile choice. It’s perfect for all holidays, new year’s greetings, or just a way to give an update to friends and family at the end of a big year.
Six rows—three on the front side and three on the back—each align a photo, block of text, and vertical header. It’s a simple layout with a unique look, and easy to customize with quick summaries of major happenings from the year. Choose any six features of your choice, whether it’s updates on the kids’ ages and milestones, career moves, memorable vacations, personal events, or sweet messages of love to everyone you know.
Top Highlights Year in Review
With its checkerboard layout and eye-catching gold lettering, the Top Highlights Year in Review
is a bold and festive choice for a year-in-review holiday card. Eight thumbnail photo spots on the front and one full-size portrait spot on the back can accommodate ample favorite pics from the year. There’s also a text line on the reverse side for writing your custom holiday greeting.
If you can’t narrow down your best photos to just a handful, this card has room for them all! Follow the suggested format and select five highlights from your year. Summarize them in just a sentence and let the array of photos tell the story in pictures as well.
Calendar Year in Review
Creating your own custom Calendar Year in Review card is an easy and rewarding project with this elegant theme. The 12-month grid of photos on the front of the card invites you to mindfully browse your full year’s photo reel and choose one highlight from each month. With the name of the month as the only suggested caption under each photo, you don’t have to come up with any words to describe the highlights of your year. Just let the pictures show, rather than tell, everyone about your best memories.
Add a custom greeting and sign-off on the back of this delightful year-in-review Christmas card. The back also offers two landscape photo spaces for a couple of all-time favorite pics or special holiday photos. Need some ideas? Take a look at our 30 Best Christmas Card Photo Ideas for 2025.
Tips for your year-in-review holiday cards
Our top tip for year-in-review holiday cards is to choose a Mixbook card theme that:
- Appeals to your preferred aesthetic style for the holidays, whether it’s modern and minimalist or cute and colorful. And…
- Offers the right balance of text and photos to suit your preferences. You might be wordy and want to share a write-up of the year’s events, or prefer to let the photos do all the sharing.
Here are some more tips for year-in-review cards:
- Choose your holiday: Year-in-review cards are a super-versatile type of greeting card for the holiday season. Send them for Christmas, Hanukkah, a generic “Season’s Greetings,” or as an all-inclusive “Happy New Year” card.
- Focus on warm and fuzzy feelings: Choose photos and greetings that are positive, joyful, and authentic. Even if you had an uneventful or challenging year, stick to sharing the brighter moments and wishing others well.
- Don’t brag: There’s a fine line between sharing your joy and accomplishments and bragging. Don’t cross that line! Do share your biggest achievements—those you know your friends and family will be happy to hear about. But also feature some everyday moments and less flashy updates as well. Aim for a balanced approach.
- Include everyone: Many parents fill their photo holiday cards with cute pics of their kids, but your friends and family want to see the smiling faces of all generations as well. And don’t forget the pet pics!
Create your year-in-review cards today
If you want to send out your year-in-review cards before ringing in the new year, head over to Mixbook and get started today.
You’ll need to spend a little time choosing your best photos from the year, but after that, creating your card is quick and easy. Simply choose a theme, launch it in Mixbook Studio™, and customize the card with your photos and text.
Creating year-in-review cards is a wonderful way to celebrate an entire year of meaningful memories and share your joy with your nearest and dearest. Isn’t that what the holidays are all about?!
