A Minimalist Christmas Scrapbook

Every other Friday, I write a post about Minimalist Scrapbooking.


In my latest email newsletter, I asked readers what tips they had for scrapboking the holidays. Here’s what I learned:

• Get the previous Christmas scrapbooked before the upcoming Christmas.
• Keep it consistent. Start and end Christmas layouts in a similar way (same photo-type, different year).

I love both these tips and they both fit my Christmas scrapbooking style to some extent.

Here’s what I do:

I have an album that is just for Christmas layouts. In general, I only include layouts from the actual holiday. So baking Christmas cookies goes into the year album, but a layout about leaving cookies out for Santa goes into the Christmas book. Santa pages might go in either album. Basically, I don’t really have any hard and fast rules, but I do want to limit what is included in the Christmas album. The Christmas album is placed under our Christmas tree as long as our tree is up. We use an artificial tree, so there are no worries about sap getting on the album.

My Christmas album starts with the first Christmas we had with our daughter. The reason for this is that I hadn’t considered keeping a separate Christmas album until I was interviewing scrapbookers for my doctoral research, which was while I was pregnant with my daughter. I’ve considered going back and including past Christmases, but doubt I will as they are already scrapbooked in yearly albums.

I do try to scrapbook the previous Christmas before the new Christmas. I like to scrapbook last year’s Christmas close to the new holiday.

As I was looking through my Christmas layouts for this post, I did notice that I did not include much journaling. I need to make a better effort at including more journaling on these layouts.

There are a lot of options for Christmas journaling/scrapbooking/photography inspiration:

• Ali Edward’s December Daily
• Shimelle’s Journal Your Christmas
• Maggie Holme’s December Daily Photography Workshop
• Katrina Kennedy’s and Get it Scrapped Capture Your Holidays
• Big Picture Classes’ 12 Days of Christmas
• Tim Holt’z Twelve Tags of Christmas (I’m not sure if he is doing this again this year or not.)
• Paper Coterie’s Picture the Holidays

I will be following along Ali Edward’s December Daily, but will not be making a December Daily. This project is free to follow along on her blog. Some of the other above options are also free, but some are more structured classes. I want to keep it simple and I don’t want to feel like I have to record everything. I know, I know…all of these classes/inspiration/what have you all stress that you just pick and choose what you want to do. I’d rather just start with my list of stories I want to record and go from there.

My goal is to begin recording some of these holiday stories in my Christmas scrapbook:

• The Christmas day meal
• Holiday baking
• Holiday shopping
• Gift-giving traditions
• Christmas Eve traditions
• Christmas day traditions
• Visiting Santa
• Letter to Santa
• Christmas movies
• Christmas music
• Christmas trees
• Christmas lights
• Favorite moment
• Favorite gift
• Favorite tradition

I won’t get to all these stories this year, but want to make sure these stories eventually get included in the Christmas scrapbook. This year I want to make sure to make a layout about holiday movies. I’ve been thinking about this story for quite some time, so it is time to get it recorded. I will also try to do a letter to Santa from my daughter. Other than that, we’ll see what happens. What holiday stories do you like to or want to record? Do you have any tips for holiday scrapbooking? Comment below!

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Stephanie