Christmas

Yesterday we mailed out our annual calendar; it was a little more challenging this year, with less winter pictures due to spending 10 months of the year in Florida, and then a general tricky time picking “month relevant” pictures, with so much going on in the last year!

Also challenging this year was where to order! It used to be easy, we’d order from Kodak UK, which meant that the calendar has English dates marked (Mother’s day is different in England, for example), and shipping was inexpensive – almost all the calendars we send go to our family, all in England.
After Kodak closed, I tried Apple – their calendar creation within iPhoto is excellent, but they are incapable of shipping to England from a USA account! Stupidity. Turns out, their calendars are huge too, bigger than I like.

Last year I used Shutterfly, which went well – but visiting them again this year, their prices were very high ($15/calendar+shipping), and their website was awful. I got assorted glitches with the calendar creation, and terrible trouble trying to set up shipping. The program has an address book offering entries like “The Cull Family”, but shipping doesn’t recognize this and demands a first and last name for every address! I wasted some hours on Shutterfly.
I checked out Costco too, better pricing but still a challenging website – and like Apple, no idea about shipping to non USA addresses.

Then I visited Vistaprint; I’d tried them once before too, and found the quality to be low (thin paper, cheap feel); but now I saw that there’s an upgrade to card stock, with the final price still well below $10/calendar. What’s more, the online calendar creation worked very well, and I was able to add specific dates (so I could add UK Mother’s day, for example).
With shipping, it turned out that if I ordered all calendars to my address, there was a quantity discount – and now, even with paying about $7/calendar to ship to England, my final cost is less than $18; and the quality is good, too!
So I think I’ll check out Vistaprint again next year …