Holiday: Scrapbooking - The Gift of Memories

The holidays have always been a time for family, for friends, for reminiscing and for making new memories. A perfect gift for Christmas, Mother's Day, birthdays or any other holiday is the gift of those memories. Every family has a treasure trove of photos and other memorabilia stashed away in boxes, drawers and old albums that are falling apart.

Scrapbooking is a way to organize all those photos, postcards, programs, menus, matchbooks, pressed corsages and other pieces of family history in a beautiful album that will be looked at and treasured for years to come. Bringing all those things together in an album often comes to mean almost as much to those that create the gift as it does the person it was created for.

Scrapbooks are a very warm personal and sentimental gift. They can light up any holiday celebration. Once the gift has been opened you'll find everyone spending hours going through the book and remembering all the wonderful times and the people that have passed through their lives. Photos that bring back memories of weddings and birthday parties, the program from your daughters first ballet recital, the matchbook from the restaurant where you and your future husband had your first dinner. All these things make the scrapbook a gift that will be cherished.

Putting together an album has come a long way from the days of the slipping the pictures under a plastic sheet or, for those of us old enough to remember, sliding the edges of the pictures into the little black paper corners that are glued to a black construction paper page. Modern scrapbooking is an art form. Scrapbooking doesn't take any special skills. With a little patience and the proper tools you can build a scrapbook that you would be proud to give as a gift to anyone.

With beautiful decorative papers for the pages, special scissors and other cutting tools for decorative edges and designs, stamps and other supplies you can custom build a beautiful piece of family history. Scrapbooking is something the entire family can take part in. Even a young child can enjoy helping. Just the memories that are jogged and the stories that can be told while organizing the items for the book make the project worthwhile.

There are websites that can walk you through the basics, there are community classes for scrapbooking and there are people you can find through your local paper, the yellow pages or on the Internet that will be glad to build your scrapbook for you.

Another option as an alternative to the album is to gather all the photos together, put them in some semblance of order and take them to a place that will put it all onto a video tape or DVD for you, unless of course you're lucky enough to have the knowledge and skill to do so yourself. This also has the advantage of keeping your photos safe from deterioration due to age or normal wear and tear.