My All Time Favorite Tradition
I’m not really big on New Year’s Resolutions. But I have one thing I do religiously every time the year rolls over. It is hands-down the best way I’ve found to do so many of the things that many New Year’s Resolutions are targeted at:
Spend more time with family
Be present with kids
Build a practice of gratitude
…and I don’t have to think about it at all.
It has become my favorite tradition of all time. But it didn’t start that way.
A Tradition is Born
When my husband went on his first deployment, my son was just about 6 months old. Being a first-time mom, I was extra concerned about everything. (Moms will know what I’m talking about).
I was determined to find a way to ensure that my little one would remember his dad’s face and feel like he was still connected to him despite the impending 6 month separation. At such a young age, there weren’t a ton of options. Yes, we planned weekly FaceTimes. (But have you ever FaceTimed with a 6 month old? There’s not a whole lot happening there.)
So I decided to create a photo book with pictures of our family, that heavily featured dad, for us to look at every day while he was gone. I just slapped a bunch of pictures we had taken since he was born into a quick book and had it printed.
It worked great for the intended purpose.
But we found, even after dad returned, we’d look at it all the time. And as my son got older, he continued to ask to look at it regularly. It was something we all ended up loving.
In fact, we all liked it so much that I decided to start making one each year at the end of the year.
A Tradition Matures
What started by accident, has matured over the years into my favorite holiday tradition. After my first hastily thrown together book, each year the photo book has matured and grown.
What started as pictures in no particular order has turned into a chronological showcase of the year. It became a reminder of everything joyful and fun we’d done that year. And with it came so many wonderful gifts.
A Practice of Gratitude
The first thing we noticed was how much we’d forgotten at the end of the year. We would look back over the book and wonder how we’d packed so many trips and adventures into a single year. It made us so much more conscious of everything we had to be grateful for, made it so much easier to hold on to precious memories.
And something interesting started to happen: the book wormed its way into our brains. Suddenly we started remembering to capture simple moments or “firsts” as the kids grew. The phrase “we’ve got to make sure to get a picture for the book” made its way into our vocabulary.
Suddenly we were doing a better job of feeling that gratitude in the moment. And making sure we were capturing the evidence we needed to revisit that memory later.
Holding Onto the Little Moments
Then one year I decided it would be fun to include some of the funny things the kids had said that had managed to etch their way into our memories that year. Capturing those “kids say the darndest things” quotes helped me hold onto things I knew would evaporate from my memory if I didn’t catch them soon enough.
But after that first idea, something else interesting happened: suddenly my husband and I found ourselves with notes on our phones that we updated any time the kids said something we wanted to make sure we remembered to put in the book.
It became a part of our lives to save the little moments. And, as you can imagine, we had a whole lot more that we remembered at the end of that year than we had before.
Highlighting Opportunities
One of the great things about the book is that it also gives us a time, once a year, to look back on the year and consider what we could do better.
For instance, in 2020, the infamous year that COVID hit and we spent much of our time in quarantine, I noticed something that encouraged me to do better.
In addition to COVID canceling a good portion of our travel plans, my husband was also deployed for about half the year. When I came around to making the book, I found not one single picture, over the course of the entire year, with the two of us together.
I realized that we do a great job of capturing family pictures when we are on vacations or in cool places and of taking pictures of the kids with one of us. But we sucked at remembering to take pictures of the memories we wanted to capture of the two of us.
Can you guess what we did a better job of in 2021?
I love having the opportunity to review the past in order to continue to improve the way our family functions. We so often remember to do this with work but rarely do we take the opportunity to consider how we can reinvest in our family life.
It’s Actually Pretty Easy
One of my favorite parts of this little tradition is that it isn’t hard or time consuming at all. My process pretty much looks like this:
Coming into the week between Christmas and New Years, I ask family members to send me pics of the year (bonus points if you just keep a shared photo album and everyone throws them in over the course of the year). I download the Shutterfly App on my phone and select all the photos to upload.
Go use one of the pre-made “theme” photo books the far more talented designers than myself at Shutterfly prepare.
Build the book. I always time this on the week between Christmas and New Years because I usually am off work and the kids are home so we can all go through the pictures together and put them in the book. This takes, at most, a couple of hours.
Leave a placeholder for the last few days of the year.
Finish the book on January 1 and send it off for printing.
You can feast your eyes on this year’s edition if you need some inspiration.
