I wanted to commemorate our puzzles for Day Six. We’ve been working on this Harry Potter puzzle for over a week and finally finished it!!

Here’s a single page look:

I’ve been trying to keep it simple this year so it’s still doable.

 

Here’s day two! I decided to keep this day light. I loved this photo of the two boys looking over the Nintendo DS so I just snapped it and then wrote a small amount of journaling.

I like the way the page looks and the transparency.

a simple one today 🙂

Since I generally lag a day behind for December Daily, I figured a good way to start is posting my initial pages. I will do my best to keep up with this each day and see if I can post, but considering how my schedule is considerably more hectic than usual, we’ll see if I can manage this.

After much deliberation, I decided not to put anything on the cover of my journal yet. The items I put usually fall off over the years so I didn’t want to bother this time. We’ll see if I change my mind by the end of the month. So when you open the album, the first page you see is this:

 

The first page is an overlay, it’s transparent so you can see the photo below.

here’s a closer look at the snowflake:

when you flip the transparency, you get to this page. I wanted the first thing to be a photo of all of us as of now :

it’s become my tradition to start the album with “and so it begins”:

a little word sticker on the bottom right:

and the back of the page has my reason why:

it’s sparkly. this is the first time I’ve done the reason why.

and there we are. tomorrow we’ll begin properly.

Hello December, love you so!

It’s almost time for the most magical time of the year. My favorite.  I am not a fan of winter in general.  I don’t celebrate any of the other national holidays with vigor. I don’t care for Valentine’s Day, Halloween or even Thanksgiving, really. I don’t mind any of them (well I am not a fan of all the scary stuff around Halloween.) I just don’t feel the need to go all out. I don’t feel motivated to make a big deal.

But that’s not true for Christmastime.

I am a bonafide fan of December. I’ve always loved the New Year. I’ve always loved twinkling lights. I’ve always loved Christmas Trees. There were bits and pieces of this season that I’ve cherished over my lifetime. But I firmly believe that this lovely little project has contributed widely to my love of the holiday season. Here are the things this little album has added into my life:

• It’s made me more intentional: More things happen because I plan them.
• It’s made me take more photos: I make a point to bring my camera, to pause to capture the moments.
• It’s made me more reflective: I take the time to journal my thoughts, print the photos, and put everything together every single night. This means I reflect daily.
• It’s made me more grateful: Reflecting daily almost always translates to huge amounts of gratitude.
• It’s made me more creative: I am guaranteed to spend some time doing something artsy/crafty every day in December.

How can you not love this project?

I always put my pre-pages together before the month but this year I found myself struggling with the idea. I was thinking maybe it’s better if I just wait until December and do it daily. Then I remembered how hard decision-making can be when you have too many choices and reminded myself that this helps narrow things down and make this project considerably more manageable. So I compromised and kept my pages pretty bare. This gives me a starting point but also gives me flexibility. (I’ve put in some pretty magazine pages in place of photos for now so it’s easier to see the page content.)

I’ve been doing a monthlong December project since 2007 which means this will be my tenth December album. Here’s to many many more.