Christmas journal~

In the scrapping community there are a lot of people keeping record of the events of this holiday season, and I decided to join them this year. I got this wonderful, handmade notebook from my friend Sarah this summer, and it has been sitting on my desk just waiting for a special occasion to be filled up. I looked at it in a new way as the Christmas season rolled around a couple of weeks ago and realized with the red and green striped cover it would be perfect for a little Christmas journal.
Now, you must realize that I do not have much free time in my schedule, which includes maintaining a household of six (four of them are 8 and under), teaching part-time at high school and lots of other things in between all of that. So, I really wanted to keep it simple- yet still make something that I could consider a 'keepsake'. =) Talk about a challenge right? Simple, but not a piece of junk to be thrown away in the end. I was so glad that I had this little book because it provided a great starting point...and simple is exactly what it has been so far.
What I have been doing is filling it each day with a memory or detailed event that our family has done as we countdown the days until Christmas. From baking a batch of cookies to spending a night with friends, it's all in there, along with little 'extras'. There is patterened paper, stickers, rub-ons, ribbons, felt shapes, stamping and my own doodling and handwriting. I just think it will be a fun things- especially if I do it each year for several years- to have a bunch of these to read through each Christmas and to see what has become tradition and what sorts of things we can laugh about or we would have forgotten had they not been written down.
Anyway, I just thought I would share my little book with you. It's not too late to start one of your own- even if it's just a plain notebook where you jot down a couple of thoughts and notes each day. To me the little details are so important because they weave the fabrics of our life stories. And for some reason, these same details are the ones that get lots and overlooked most often...so it's just another way to keep track of them at such a special time of year. In a really simple way.