What I realized this Christmas…

Each year, I set out our Christmas albums on our oversized ottoman in the family room.  I love being able to look through the Christmas past and watch how the children have grown.  Having them out like this as part of our decorations, encourages the kids and visitors to look.  This year, not sure why not before, I realized I’m extremely behind.  The last year to have a half way decent documentation of Christmas is 2004.  I was stunned and deflated.

Like I always do, I have several theories for what contributed to this lack of Christmas scrapbooking.
1. I get really bored, tired and just plan uninspired by the Christmas layouts.  All the photos really start to look the same. The subject matter is pretty much the same.  It’s kind of monotonous.
2. My father-in-law passed away right after Christmas 2005.  While not realizing it, I think I was just avoiding doing those pages because it hurt too much.
(Richard always makes fun of me for having my “theories”.  Most of the time I do this without even realizing it. )

Despite the reasons for not doing it, I want to make it a priority.  It really does bring me a lot of joy to look back at our Christmas past.   And I was very disheartened to realize so much of it was missing.

To that end, I’ve devoted the last three layouts to Christmas (and I’m still going).   I started with this year because this year’s Christmas photos are very different from years past.  I love this one.  I didn’t love working with glitter I used on the snowflakes I cut with my Slice, but I do really like the results.

The next two are pretty simple layouts and go back to fill in some gaps from 2002 and 2003. Glad to have them done! And happy to be making good use of my Fa, la, la Slice cartridge.

Yesterday, I took a mixed media class/workshop taught by a local artist.  I wish I would have gone a totally different direction with my project.  Trying to decide if I want to finish it or just chunk it.  I did enjoy doing something different and hope to go again in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, one more thing to share.  Last night the strangest thing happened.  We were all busy doing various things in the house and all of a sudden Tucker was whining and grumbling at the back door.  Richard got up to see what had him all worked up.  He saw three deer by the fence.  He called us down to see the deer and as we were all looking each of us kept finding more.  It was so surreal. It was very foggy and dark so the deer were very shadowy.  We finally let Tucker run out and bark at them so we could watch them run off and see how many were actually out there. At final count there were 7 deer in the field behind and on the side of us. For the life of me I can’t figure out how Tucker knew they were there.