★★★★★Marie
Simple, and it does the one job. The sent and not-sent column is oddly satisfying.
The Fifty-Card Christmas List
It earns its place at forty cards and up, when some go overseas, and when you have ever run out of stamps on the eighteenth of December.
$9
- Excel and Google Sheets both open it — .xlsx included
- Nothing to install, nothing to subscribe to
- Opens on your phone
- Instant download after payment
- 14-day refund, no questions
A list of sixty cards is a small production. This one holds the names, remembers who wrote back and who did not, works out the packs and the books of stamps, and splits the writing across the evenings you actually have.
Most card lists are just last year's card list
And last year's was the year before's. Nobody sits down in January and prunes it, because in January the cards are in a drawer and the whole thing is eleven months away. So the list grows, quietly, and one year you write to a doctor who left the practice in 2019. Meanwhile the shopping is a guess. Cards come in tens, stamps come in twenties, and neither has anything to do with how many people you write to. Too few means a second trip in the third week of December, which is the worst week of the year for one. And sixty cards at four minutes each is four hours nobody has in one sitting — with the overseas ones needing to be gone ten days before the rest.
Three jobs, one file, once a year
Eighty households, their group, home or overseas, and whether they wrote back the last two years. Nothing is ever deleted — a name you drop stays on the list, greyed, in case you change your mind. Cards plus your spares, rounded up to whole packs. Home stamps rounded up to whole books, overseas counted singly. Plus what will still be in the drawer in January. What is left to write, split across the evenings you said you had, overseas first. Tick one off and the remaining evenings re-split themselves.
The column that tells you what the history says
Beside every household is a verdict, worked out from two years of who wrote back. Two years, nothing back means you sent a card and heard nothing, twice running. They wrote first means they wrote to you when you did not write to them, which is the one line on the sheet worth acting on today. Two years is deliberately slow. One quiet year means nothing — people are ill, move house, lose the address, or simply have a bad December. And the sheet prices it, so you can see exactly how small the stakes are: what the quiet names cost in cards, stamps and hours. It is a prompt to think, not an instruction.
What's inside
- Start Here
- The order to do things in, and one honest paragraph about what the verdict column is and is not.
- Setup
- The year, what a pack of cards and a stamp cost you, stamps in a book, both posting deadlines, your writing evenings, and how long one card takes you.
- The List
- Up to 80 households. Group, home or overseas, sent last year, heard back the last two years, the sending decision, written and posted ticks, and the verdict.
- Cards & Stamps
- Cards plus spares rounded to whole packs, home stamps rounded to whole books, overseas counted singly, what is left over, the total, and the cost of one card sent.
- Writing Plan
- Evening by evening, overseas first, with days left until each deadline and how far through you are. Re-splits itself every time you tick one off. Prints on one page.
How it works
- 1PayCard only. No account, no password, no address. Two fields and a payment box.
- 2DownloadThe link appears on screen straight away and lands in your inbox at the same time. It does not expire.
- 3Open itDouble-click for Excel, or File → Import → Replace spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Every formula carries over.
Specifications
- Formats
- Excel (.xlsx), Google Sheets (.xlsx) and a printable PDF guide
- Tabs
- 5
- Works in
- Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice
- Opens on
- Desktop and phone
- Delivery
- Instant download, plus an emailed link that does not expire
Who this is not for
If you send twelve cards, you do not need this. Twelve is an afternoon with the radio on and no plan required.
There is nowhere to put addresses, on purpose. This is the list and the plan, not an address book — eighty postal addresses in a spreadsheet you email around is a worse idea than it first looks. And typing the list out the first year takes about an hour. Every year after that it takes ten minutes, which is the whole argument for it.
It earns its place at forty cards and up, when some go overseas, and when you have ever run out of stamps on the eighteenth of December.
Before you buy
Do I need to pay for Google Sheets?
No. Google Sheets is free with any Google account. If you would rather use Excel, that file is in the same download.
Where do the addresses go?
They do not. This is the list and the plan, not an address book. The Notes column is there for the one thing you always forget about each household.
I cannot remember who wrote back last year.
Leave the two columns blank and fill them in as this year's cards arrive on the mantelpiece. The verdict will be right next December, and every December after that.
How many names does it hold?
Eighty households. If you write more than eighty cards by hand you are running a business, and we would genuinely like to hear about it.
The posting dates look wrong for my country.
Change them. They are two ordinary date cells on the Setup tab and every count-down works back from them. The defaults assume standard post in December, not express.
Does it print?
The Writing Plan does, on one page. The List does not, on purpose — eighty rows and eleven columns is a thing to work in, not a thing to carry around.
What if it does not work for me?
Email us within 14 days and we refund it. You keep the file. We would rather have the feedback than the nine dollars.
Reviews
★★★★Ellen S.
Very good for the volume I do. I keep addresses in here now rather than digging through last year's envelopes, which was the real time sink.
★★★★★Barbara
Sixty-three cards this year, eleven of them overseas. Having the international deadlines in the same sheet as the addresses meant I posted the Australia ones on time for once.
All ten holiday planners — $39
The gift budget, the Thanksgiving timeline, the blended-family gift tracker, the remote Secret Santa kit, the cookie swap planner, the two-families travel budget, the fifty-card Christmas list, the mixed-diet menu planner, the toddler activity calendar, and the ninety-day January debt reset. Bought separately they are $90.
Get all ten — $39
