Every year around mid-November, someone—usually from marketing, sometimes from the CEO's office—asks me the same question. "What do I write in a business Christmas card?" It sounds simple enough. You've seen the templates online. "Wishing you a prosperous New Year," "Thank you for your partnership," all that. I've probably reviewed a dozen versions of that exact question over the last five years of managing our company's vendor gift program.
The thing is, that question is almost never the real question.
The Surface Problem: "What Do I Write?"
The person asking me thinks they're asking about wording. They want to know the difference between "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays," whether to address the contact by first name or full title, and if mentioning a specific deal from 2024 comes across as too transactional. Maybe 200-300 words of appropriate corporate cheer.
I used to answer this directly. I'd pull up our company's tone guidelines, suggest something warm but not familiar, and send them a few options. That works about 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time, they come back the next day with a new problem: they liked the wording, but their department needs to produce the actual cards. Usually, that's when the real conversation starts.
The Deeper Issue (The Part Nobody Says Out Loud)
The real problem isn't the text for a business Christmas card. It's everything that comes after. The desk that you sat down at last year to write 400 personalized messages. The printer that ran out of ink after card 87. The stack of mismatched envelopes. The 10pm realization that you've been formatting addresses wrong for three hours.
In 2022, our marketing coordinator spent a whole Saturday afternoon handwriting addresses because the print job was too small for the offset printer they usually use. She's a great writer. She's not a fast hand-letterer. That project took her about 8 hours, and the results were inconsistent. Some names were smudged. One envelope had a typo.
It's not just about what to write. It's about how to get the writing done efficiently and consistently across a group of 50 to 500 recipients. That's the part the blog posts don't cover. They tell you the greeting is the core. In practice, the execution is the core. I'd argue the execution is 80% of the entire holiday card project cost.
(Should mention: this doesn't only apply to Christmas cards. I also had a similar situation in June for a summer client appreciation note. The underlying principle—the operational challenge of sending physical mail to a list of people—is the same.)
The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong
Here's what happens when you focus entirely on the wording and ignore the logistics. I'll use a recent example from our office.
Last fall, the VP of Sales decided we should send a holiday card to our top 200 clients. She found a beautiful, heavy cardstock design. Letterpress, gold foil, the works. Looked fantastic. Then someone—I think it was the intern in marketing—ordered the printing from a specialty shop without checking the timeline. The cards arrived on December 12th. The envelopes were separate, and they were basic, cheap manila. No custom printing.
We then had to figure out how to address 200 envelopes. The intern suggested handwriting everything. That got vetoed when someone pointed out the intern's handwriting was illegible. We needed to print labels. But the design used a dark envelope, and our office laser printer couldn't handle the thickness. We ended up paying a local print shop $1.50 per envelope for white ink printing. That added $300 to the project on top of the card cost.
For a project where the total cost of the cards themselves was maybe $600, we spent an extra $300 on execution and easily 10 hours of coordination time among three people. The VP was happy with the final result. The accounting department was less happy when they saw the invoice for expedited setup at the print shop. I should add that we had a perfectly good label printer sitting in the supply closet at that time. I just didn't think to use it for this application.
So, What's the Solution? (Keeping It Short)
For 2024, I took a different approach. When the marketing coordinator asked me "What do I write?" I didn't give her a script. I asked her what list she was mailing to. She said 150 clients, plus 50 partners. Addresses were a mix of offices and home offices. Total count: around 200.
I walked over to the supply closet and pulled out the Brother P-Touch label maker we use for folder labels and cable management. It's not a fancy machine. It's the same kind you see in a shipping department or an electrical closet. I said, "Forget the cardstock envelope drama. Let's use a simple, light-colored envelope and print the addresses on these labels."
The coordinator looked skeptical. The labels looked "temporary" to her. I explained that the trick is to use a clear label cartridge—they become invisible on a light envelope. You just see the text. It looks like it's printed directly on the paper. She tried it on one envelope and was shocked. You literally cannot tell it's a label unless you touch the edge.
From start to finish, setting up the template on the Brother label maker took maybe 15 minutes. We imported the address list from our CRM. Printing 200 labels took another 20 minutes. Applying them to envelopes? About 45 minutes for two people working together. That's around an hour and a half of total labor, versus the 10 hours plus $300 from the year before.
And the writing part? I still helped with the wording. We settled on something simple. "We value your partnership and look forward to another successful year together." That was the bulk of the message. The names and addresses were the time-consuming part, and we handled that in under an hour.
The Takeaway (Not About Christmas Cards)
This isn't really a story about Christmas cards. It's a story about the hidden operational friction in projects that seem simple on paper. The bottleneck is almost never the creative brief. It's the execution—the physical act of transforming a digital list into 200 physical objects that get in the mail. If you can solve that problem, with the right hardware and a little bit of process, the actual content becomes trivial.
I'm not saying you should buy a Brother label maker just for holiday cards. But if you already have one, don't overlook it. And if you're in the market for a new office printer? I've been very happy with the Brother HL-L3270CDW we got last year. It's a color laser that's handled everything from cardstock to labels without a jam.
(Standard paper sizes, for reference: US business cards are 3.5 by 2 inches. A standard envelope is usually a #10, which is 4.125 by 9.5 inches. For label printing, you want a label that's about 1 by 2.5 inches for a clear address block. Source: standard USPS mail guidelines.)
Oh, and something I forgot: the Brother MFC-L8900CDW toner. We replaced our old black-and-white workhorse with this model at the end of 2023. The high-yield toner cartridges are rated for about 8,000 pages. For a small-to-mid size office, I'm swapping them maybe twice a year. That's a lot fewer interruptions than the old printer that needed a new cartridge every 1,500 pages.
So, what to write in a business Christmas card? It really doesn't matter. Just keep it appropriate and don't misspell the client's name. The real trick is figuring out how to get 200 of them in the mail before the holiday shipping cutoff—without staying late to hand-address envelopes.
