I’d been saying for years that I wanted to create dedicated Christmas scrapbooks. You know, books that only contained a few pages per year and you could flip through every single family Christmas in one swoop. I’d forgotten, apparently, that I stopped scrapbooking around the time my oldest child started crawling and never, ever picked it back up again.
Still, I was determined! I wanted to flip through nine years of kids-on-Santa’s-lap-at-the-mall photos. That meant I had a lot of sorting to do, since I had to go back to Christmas 2010, when our oldest child was just six months old. Our oldest is now nine years old and we’re about to celebrate our 10th Christmas as a family, so I had nine years’ worth of digital photos to sort through.
I had some of the photos printed already, stuffed in various envelopes and tucked into folders, but I had to print most of them. It’s a long process, but it’s the hardest part — I promise. You don’t realize how many pictures you take of your children at Christmas until you’re trying to narrow it down to a dozen or so per year.
To keep my photos sorted by year, I made nine folders on my desktop (labelled 2010, 2011, 2012, etc.) before sending them to be printed. Some years had more must-print photos than others and that was fine.
It’s all a matter of deciding which memories are the ones you really want to preserve — family gatherings, school Christmas concerts, happy faces opening presents, special meals, pets dressed up as reindeer, etc. For me, it was important to display our annual family Christmas card, our Santa photos and the kids in their matching Christmas Eve pyjamas.
Once my photos were printed, I spread out a few pieces of scrapbook paper and started grouping the photos together on the pages so I had a rough idea of how many pages I’d fill. I used between two and 10 pictures per page, depending on if I trimmed them or not.
When I was happy with the amount of photos and pages, I started cutting up the photos (if necessary) and gluing them onto the pages. If there was only a tiny part of the picture that was really special, I cut away the rest and saved the page space for something else. I sometimes cut circles around my kids’ cute little heads and glued them randomly onto the page. I had fun with it and didn’t get too picky about how things looked.
If you’ve saved copies of your family’s old annual Christmas cards or Christmas letters, I definitely recommend putting them to good use and adding them to your scrapbook. If you haven’t saved them, don’t worry; just put aside a copy each year going forward. (Save two copies if you’re saving a double-sided card or letter so you can display both sides in the book.) I loved seeing all of our photo-heavy Christmas cards one after another.
Now, I had saved quite a few Christmas cards given to us from friends and family over the years, although I hadn’t done anything with them except shove them into a large freezer bag. I decided to cut them up so I could recycle them into decorations for the scrapbook pages — a sparkly snowflake here, a glittery tree there. No need to spend big bucks at the craft store on fancy scrapbooking embellishments when all of these lovely cards arrived in your mailbox for free. I had plenty of decorations from cards alone, but you could also use Christmas wrapping paper, flattened bows, pretty gift tags or pictures cut from catalogues.
My last step was writing out captions for the pages — by hand, as well as on the computer to print out — so anyone flipping through the book could see the year, our children’s ages, the locations of the photos and any other special details. I glued the captions onto the pages and liked how I could see, at a glance, whether my daughter was two or three in a particular photo without thinking twice.
I documented nine full Christmases and haven’t even filled two full scrapbooks yet, so I hope to get 2010 through 2020 in these pretty black and gold polka-dot albums. So far, I’m planning to keep them on display year-round for people to flip through, but you could also tuck them away with the Christmas decor and only bring them out in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Either way, I hope you decide to give these Christmas scrapbooks a try. You’ll love being able to easily look back at the special holiday memories you and your family have made together over the years. I know I have.
How to maintain your Christmas scrapbooks
Once you’ve done the hard work of going back through the years, printing pictures, organizing old cards and creating the books, maintaining the books going forward isn’t going to take much time at all. Here’s a quick list of how to maintain your family’s Christmas scrapbooks just by adding a couple of pages each year.
- Put aside a copy of your family’s annual Christmas card (or two, if it’s double-sided).
- Save any Christmas cards your family receives and cut them up at the end of the season to save the best bits (e.g. pretty decals, metallic decorations and/or glittery snowflakes).
- Go through your camera roll and print out the very best photos from mid-December through New Year’s — ideally no more than four images for every page you wish to add to your scrapbook.
- Glue the cards, photos and cut-out decorations onto scrapbook paper.
- Write or print captions for the photos that require them and be sure to include the year, as well as the age of any children.
- Slip the new pages into the end of your scrapbook and you’re home free until next January!
This content originally appeared in Yuletide Preparations, a SaltWire custom publishing title.
This content originally appeared in YULETIDE PREPARATIONS, a SaltWire custom publishing title.
