Digital Scrapbooking 101 BLOG

Author: Wes Waddell

Family is everything during the Christmas, Kwanza and Hanukkah holiday season.

It’s the one time of year that even your teenagers will make an effort to participate in family activities. They may even instigate one or two new ones of their own

One of the activities we started while our kids were still teens was to use the joy of the season to create holiday scrapbooks for other family and friends. We found that it was actually quite easy to get the kids involved as even they loved going through the family vacation and holiday party photos from the last year and into years past.

The only real hard part was getting them to focus on only a few pages worth of pictures and not trying to create a 200 page complete family heritage project. That kind of time, we usually just didn’t have.

Keep the smiles coming… Some of the details our teenagers remembered from the past year alone were quite the eye openers. To be young and see the world like that again… I know it kept us smiling.

We would take one of the early long weekends, like Veterans Day in early November, and use the long weekend with no school to plan, start and even complete our family holiday scrapbook. We would start on Friday evening after school was out and use that time to brainstorm ideas to create the theme for that year. Once we got started, we would have little ideas pop up all night, during dinner, while watching TV and just before bed. We wrote each of them down on a long list, not stopping until lights out.

On Saturday morning, we would go over all the ideas over breakfast and choose one for the project. Each year, on member of the family was chosen (we went in order of birth and rotated each year) as project lead and they held the final decision power if we couldn’t narrow it down to just one idea.

It was amazing how being responsible for the final outcome of the project that was being given to other family and friends made everyone cooperate and get along.

The rest of Saturday was spent gathering up the photographs (digital and print) and writing down all the stories that went with them… again, this was sometimes very interesting from the kids point of view.

Sunday and Monday were spent in all kinds of different conversations while we worked to put it all together and match the themes into one finished book. The only boring part at times was all the duplicate pages for each gift. We don’t have that problem these days… but more on that in a few minutes.

It was sometimes amazing what you could do with an assembly line of family members once everything was planned and laid out. It’s funny, we never could get that organized any other time of the year.

One item of note: we took lots of photos as we did this and would make 2 to 4 pages of our own each year to add to our own growing book of memories.

Today, the kids are all grown and out on their own. But, we still use the phone and other technologies to keep the tradition going. Computers have made the duplication process a thing of the past as we do all our scrapbooking on the computer now. Everything is digital! Even the final gifts are CD and DVD presentations to most of the extended family. We have the books printed into real hardbound books for our special heirloom gifts that the grandparents (and now great grandparents) get.

The grandkids are even getting old enough to start joining in and the childhood perspective is again with us when we tell the stories.

This year’s project will be our very first Storybook Scrapbook. All our best holiday memories of the past 20 years are being added to the story of Twas the Night Before Christmas. We can’t wait to read the finished book to our youngest grandchildren Christmas Eve.

I hope that this gives you some ideas on how you can spend more quality time together as a family and make new memories in the process of remembering past ones.

Families really are everything… especially during the holiday season. I hope you’ll all find more time to spend with yours this year.

Happy Holidays!

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