With the hustle and bustle of this time of year I have added to my plate by taking Jessica Sprague’s free online Holiday course- I took another course with her in the summer on Photoshop and I just loved all that I learned! This one focuses on the holidays and has assignments that help you build an album- either paper or digital- mine will be paper of course!!

Our first assingment asks us to list of values and from them create goals for the holiday season (and yes we have to journal them on our blogs- so you can share in this with me!!). This will then become some journaling in my holiday album- what a fab start!!

The first two words that come to mind are FAMILY and TRADITION. I love this time with my family!! Every year we spend the holidays with my family or my husbands- even though this switches back and forth it has added something so very important to the holiday season. Each family group has their own traditions and I love taking part in them all- from the ones that I have always known and loved like Christmas dinners; to ones that we created as we grew up like find the Christmas pickle (this is much more innocent then is sounds) to the new traditions I adopted when I married my husband (they are French so most involve Chuch and drinking- an interesting combination!!). I would not trade the family craziness during the holidays for anything- it is far too precious!! So this year my goal is to make sure that I take it all in and enjoy every moment- cherish all the small and large memories!!

This leads to my next word: MEMORABLE- obviously making things memorable and capturing those memories is very important to me ( I am a scrapbooker after all!!) and this year is no different. I want to make our memories of this time last forever but this year I will build a new goal around this- I want to find the special memories in the smaller occurences during the holidays- the things that usually do not seem important enough to make it into my scrapbook- like a neighbour shoveling our driveway, sharing hot chocolate with my son on a cold day, making snow angels, listening to Christmas songs on the radio as we drive up north to Timmins- all of these are as precious as the bigger holiday moments.

That brings me to my last word: MAGIC. My son turns six very soon. Today as I shopped for gifts I realized that soon he may not believe in the magic of the holiday season- how sad! Every year he seems to enjoy the visit, letter and occassional phone call from Santa, more and more. I really sadden when I think this may end in a few more years SO this year I will also cherish these moments more and somehow I will capture this magic through photos and journaling so that when Austin is older he can remember just how much he did believe in magic!