I am not much of a scrapbooker. I love the idea but I just can’t follow through. The one thing I have managed to do since we had our first son, is take a photo of our family in front of our Christmas tree. I take this photo along with the Christmas card we send out that year and place it in a scrapbook….call it a Christmas Over the Years book if you will.
When I first started doing this, I would spend a bit of time putting together the page. I would find some cute stickers or embellishments, patterned paper and really try and design a page. That lasted for awhile but over the past few years, I’ve been content with just getting photo and putting our holiday card on a red or green background. It’s easy and it works.
And when it comes to the photo, my standards have gone down a bit too. While I would love to get the “perfect” shot, I’ve realized that just getting a shot of all of us together in front of the tree is enough and you gotta take what you can get.
This year was no exception…..we squeezed in a photo on December 31. As you can see, none of my kids are dressed in their Sunday best. My husband and I were on our way out to a NYE party or we probably would have been in sweats too. And while I would have liked to have set up my tripod and managed the lighting a bit better as well as centered us between the curtains, I was happy to have my daughter’s friend (who was about to be picked up by her dad to go home) take our photo. The only thing that is missing is our dog, Lulu. She was actually at our feet but didn’t quite make the frame of the photo (she is springer spaniel and is not keen on getting picked up).
So while this photo is not perfect, it is perfectly imperfect and I’m just thankful that I have a photo to add to our Christmas Over the Years scrapbook. Oh and yes, I realize the star on our tree looks a bit odd. It didn’t fit standing straight up and I didn’t want to cut more off the tree (it was already in its stand). So I figured what the heck, let’s place it on there flat….it actually made a nice star shadow on the ceiling.
