Creating a Christmas Journal gives me opportunities for experimenting. Most of the time, I’m pretty happy with the results and I have another technique up my sleeve for Project Life pages. For December 9, I tried printing on one of the patterned papers that came with the Ashley G. mini-kit offered by Ali Edwards. Can’t say I’m thrilled with the results since reading the text is more difficult than I’d like, but I decided to go with it anyway. The idea for the page originated with the Ten on Tuesday posts that I discovered on Honoré’s blog. This one was to record ten things you love to do around the holidays. 

You can’t tell from the photo, but the little dots are a beautiful gold, so the only embellishment was the 9 from the American Craft thickers I used on the cover of the journal. This list records ten things I love about Christmas: time with family, celebrating with friends, decorating the house, listening to Christmas music, entertaining, making Christmas cards, wrapping gifts, baking cookies, creating a Christmas Journal, and sitting by our new gas fireplace enjoying the lights on the tree and mantle.

December 10 records our trip to “meet” Santa at the George Eastman Museum. They always decorate the mansion beautifully, and this is the first time I’ve ever visited during the gingerbread house display. I have a lot more photos from this trip than I could fit in the journal, but even so I gave it three pages!

I wrote about Skylar’s hesitations around meeting Santa, and you can clearly see that in the photo with Grandpa. I blurred the face of the little girl talking to Santa since I don’t know her at all. I’m not sure I would have thought to take a portrait of Grandpa with the girls on the staircase, but it seemed to be a pretty popular activity, so we joined in and I finally got a shot without anyone’s feet going up and down the stairs in the photo. The left-hand page is a free photo template by Cathy Zielske.

On this page, I included the two photos I shared yesterday for Pairs, one of Matt showing Skylar some projects on his phone while we were waiting for dinner, and one of the many gingerbread houses on display.

Day 11 documents our book group meeting. We meet at someone’s house and discuss the book, then go out to dinner. That night we went to Lemoncello’s, one of my favorite Italian restaurants. I decided to include a list of the books our group read in 2015.

I read all but one of them. Fortunately, there’s no pressure in this group (Tracy, Mary, and I have belonged to this group since 1990!) to read a book that doesn’t speak to you, or if you’re just swamped with other commitments. Although most of our group liked Gutenberg’s Apprentice, neither Mike nor I could slog our way through it. As you can see, we don’t manage to meet every month; some years we read more than eight books—it all depends on peoples’ travel schedules. (Lovely to be retired!) I’m planning to do a post of the best books I read in 2015, but I can recommend any of these except Gutenberg’s Apprentice (which you might enjoy since others did) or Bury Your Life (a murder mystery that just had too many evil characters in it for my taste.)

The journaling card is from One Little Bird, and I colored the books with TomBow markers after printing it. As you can tell, the embellishments are pretty minimal. They take me the longest to figure out, and since it’s the photos and stories I want to get done, I often give up after a few minutes and say, “Good enough.” Maybe I’ll come back after the holidays and reconsider, but I think I’d best get back to my Project Life pages!

Day 6 in the Christmas Journal is all about getting Christmas cards made and in the mail. I know most of the cards have reached their senders in this country, but I’m not sure about those “across the pond.” At any rate, there’s a spoiler here if you haven’t received yours yet.

I cut the front off from one of the Christmas cards and punched holes in it to add to the album. I enrolled in Ali Edwards December Daily Workshop this year, and have gotten several ideas from the lessons, including this one.

I covered the back of the card with a piece of patterned paper from Ashley G’s mini kit. December 7 documents the first Day of Little Candles in our neighborhood. One of our new neighbors is from Columbia, and introduced us to this annual tradition. Anny had hundreds of tea lights lining her sidewalks as well as the little angel at the corner. We lit luminaries and lined our sidewalk, but I decided to include Anny’s Facebook invitation instead of a picture of our sidewalk. It’s events like this that make every Christmas Journal unique.

One of Shimelle’s recent prompts for Journal Your Christmas talked about the tradition of wish lists. I journaled about the need for wish lists for adult children as well as grandchildren. In the space of one day, I went from being about half done with my Christmas shopping to nearly done—thanks to receiving wish lists from Sarah and Betsy. On the right hand side, is a page protector that I cut down from nine squares to six squares. (Thanks again to Ali’s workshop.) Here’s a better look at it with a piece of paper behind it.

I finally broke out my fuse tool and used it to seal two of the pockets that I filled with glitter and some star sequins. Here’s a look at the back side.

This was a really fun “page” to create, and I may include another one before the month is out.

I’ve been keeping up with my Christmas Journal, and so far it’s been a December Daily. I haven’t done as well getting it photographed for the blog, but today I had some time to work on that as well. Here are the next three days, and I’ll be back soon with a few more.

I always document something about the holiday decorations. This year I decided to focus on the new things in the house. The big one is our gas fire place. We’ve talked about doing this for years, and should have done it a long time ago. We’re really enjoying it, despite the fact that we’re having one of the warmest Decembers in recent memory! I also found some tiny white lights for our mantel at a little shop in Indiana in October. I’ve looked for just the right thing for several years, and finally found them. The silver tray with candles is also new, and a bit fancier than my usual collection on the coffee table. The big red candle is a citrus cinnamon, and smells delicious!

I also like documenting the Christmas displays I see around town, and here are a few that caught my eye this year. Love those little polar bears with their noses stuck in the shopping bags.

December 5th was a busy day. We visited the South Wedge for their Christmas festivities, and hosted a family dinner that night. Skylar and Emma are sitting in a little chair that belonged to my father.

As always, I’m glad to be capturing these bits and pieces of our holiday season.

My first Christmas Journal was made in 2005, and I’ve documented December in some fashion every year since. Last year I added the pages to my Project Life album, but this year I wanted to go back to a separate journal. I signed up for Ali Edward‘s class and it was all the inspiration I needed to get going again. I haven’t had time to watch all the videos, but I have everything in order to get this year’s journal completed. Every year I put out a basket with the old journals. Even without children at home, every Christmas season has its joys and events that make it somewhat different from the previous years. Some years I did a December Daily (Ali Edwards style), and some years I followed Shimelle’s Christmas Journal prompts. My intention is for a December Daily album this year, but I’m super relaxed about it, so if there’s nothing to photograph and nothing to write about, I’ll just move on.

Here’s a look at the basket of journals sitting under the window in our living room.

I haven’t done a lot to prepare, but I did decorate the cover of my Simple Stories 6X8 album.

I found the “Merry & Bright” wooden sign at Michaels and painted it gold with acrylic paint that came with Ashley G’s mini-kit from Ali Edwards. The colors in that kit are primarily black, white, gold, red, and green which really appealed to me. I picked up the black and gold Thickers (American Craft) in Chicago. The glitter tape came from Michaels as well.

I pulled all my supplies together ahead of time, and put them in two separate boxes:

And spray painted a few wood veneer die cuts.

I never have much luck with what Shimelle calls a Manifesto, and Ali calls an Intention page. It always seems a bit over the top, but this year I came up with a three word reason why I create a Christmas Journal.

Just recently (through Pinterest, I think) I found Azzari Jarret’s blog. I knew about her work as a designer for Paislee Press, but had never gotten as far as her blog. She had a December calendar as a free download which perfectly fits my album this year.

It might seem to be a strange way to start a Christmas Journal, but my first page documents the memorial service and celebration of life for my friend, Jim. Actually, it was the most beautiful service I’ve ever attended, and a wonderful celebration. He loved Irish music and craft beers, so the celebration was held at an Irish bar downtown and the Dady Brothers performed Irish music. Three of his daughters sang a song they wrote for their dad on his 75th birthday.

I’m keeping embellishments to a minimum this year and doing all my journaling on white cards I cut myself. The “remember” sticker is from Pink Paislee and the number cards are all from the Ashley G. kit.

I decided yesterday’s post for Pairs could be the basis of Day 2 and added two more photos of flowers around the house.

My plan is to complete each day’s page the next morning. So far that’s worked, but I know for a fact, it will be impossible to do this weekend. Too many early morning commitments! Nonetheless, it’s great to back to documenting the holiday.