Camp Creek Press

Many Christmases ago, I bought this lovely album (made by Chronicle) and started recording Christmas things in it.

Now, I'm not a scrap-booker. Or a scrapper. Or whatever the correct term is. I do put my photos into albums with photo corners, but then I just scrawl captions underneath and call it a day.

We do, however, doo-dad up this album quite a bit with stickers, rubber stamps, etc. The holidays are all about going over the top, right?

The best thing about this album is, no one sees it but us, so there's no pressure to make anything look particularly good. It is a great place to keep track of special memories that would otherwise be forgotten (like the year Jack, age two, took the entire day to open his gifts, finally finishing just before bed).

It is the place to stuff the Christmas card list, the notes to Santa, copies of each year's Christmas card, etc.

We write down our Christmas Eve menu, whether we threw a party and who came, the weather on Christmas Eve and Christmas, and funny things that happened.

We put in some pictures, usually funny, leftover ones that we cut up. They are more representative of our real holidays.

We keep track of our favorite gift wrap and tags from different years, and if I manage to make anything crafty I keep a sample. (These tags were made by xeroxing old family photographs, cutting & gluing — easy peasy.)

I used to always keep copies of my Christmas card list and mark who sent me cards in return. I now have better things to do (thankfully), but it's fun to look back at the list from 10 years ago. We also keep track of where our new ornaments come from (who gave them to us, or where we bought them on vacation).

For a very low-key holiday project that can be done any old time, I highly recommend one of these albums. We have some skipped years (with blank pages left, optimistically, in case someone has time to go back and fill in — Jack's birth blacked out a year, as did a move), but in the end, it doesn't matter. Whatever we manage to save, we enjoy looking at next year and beyond.

This is just one of those simple things that really becomes meaningful. (I pretty much only do simple things — are you sensing a trend?) Another thing we did (and I would love to share it with you, if I could find it) (I'm sure it's in one of the dozen boxes of decorations): I bought a simple little blank book and every year when we set out cookies and milk for Santa, we wrote him a little note. At first we wrote the note, then our first son started writing them himself, then his little brother ... and sometimes Santa writes a quick note back! (One year the page was all wrinkled — Santa had gotten snow on it!)

So, the album will go under the tree, with the wrapping supplies, and the boys will take charge of writing in it and gluing in it this year. A simple project, but one of our favorites.