Saturday 8 December 2018

OUR FAMILY CHRISTMAS BOOK

We're getting nearer and nearer Christmas! I've spent the past week knocked out by the flu, so feel like I already have a lot of Christmas activities to catch up on. Good thing I finished buying all my Christmas presents in November! While I'm getting my Christmas crafts organized, I thought I'd share this little memory book I started a couple years ago.

In 2014 and 2015 I made whole albums dedicated to the month of December, inspired by the December Daily concept. In 2016 however, I started making albums for the whole year (here's 2016 and here's 2017--2018 is almost done!), so making a 2016 December album felt a bit redundant. I love the idea of documenting Christmas traditions though, so I decided to make a separate Christmas album inspired by this post that I came across years ago.


Finding an album I actually liked proved to be more difficult than I'd thought. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of options out there, and the ones I could find were a bit dated and just not quite what I had in mind. So I thought about DIYing it. I thought about just having a project life-style album and adding to that each year. I even thought about getting a book printed with pages ready to fill in. Eventually I settled on getting an album with blank pages and pockets. The blank pages are obviously for journaling, and in the pockets I'll keep Christmas cards. I love that this gives me a lot of freedom for doing whatever I want. I'm sure my tastes will change over the years, and I'll have years where I'm feeling super creative and years where I just want to make a couple of notes, and either way it'll be so special to look back on. If I want to write a ginormous essay detailing everything one year, I can do that. If I just want to fill the pages with photos one year, I can do that too. The book I ended up with is one of these personalized books from here.

I decided to backtrack and start in in 2015. This was the year we got married, so it seemed like a bit of a natural starting point. I insist on taking a Christmas family protrait every year, and I love seeing how our family is growing! This is already such a special album to bring out each year, and I'm already so excited to be adding on the 2018 pages. To be continued!