Monday, November 3, 2008

Homemade Holidays: Making memories

Memories fade over time, but preserving those memories can make for treasured gifts for Christmas, Mother's Day, birthdays or other special occasions.

Photographs of the grandchildren are prized possessions, but for both my parents and in-laws, keeping up with the kids creates a lot of clutter. Instead, we've come up with more creative ways to give them the latest cute kid photo without pushing piles of photographs upon them.

Photo calendars: These are a practical way to share photographs of the past year (12 to 18 or more). You can be creative and make your own with photo kits at local scrapbook stores, or if you're time crunched, a few drags-and-drops in online software can complete an order. Services that offer photo calendars include Snapfish, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Kinkos and most photo processsing studios.

Brag books: Buy or make small photo albums large enough to hold wallet-size school photos in.

Christmas memories book: Create a small album with room for photos, descriptions of family traditions, special food served, memorable gifts and more. Include pages for family members to highlight their favorite memories of Christmas. Even if you're not a scrapbooker, this can be simply done with a journal or even in your word-processing software.

Other photo-related gifts: You can plaster your photographs of the grandkid or granddog on just about any item these days, from coffee mugs to T-shirts to stamps.

Read other Homemade Holidays ideas.

1 comment:

Cathy said...

The photo books and calendars are great gifts--I'd love to make one for my parents this Christmas.