A Tradition Worth Preserving!

This one goes out to all the mommas out there who wake up in the middle of the night to the ominous “I forgot to move that stinkin’ elf!” thought.

We’ve all been there so, first off, kudos to you for bringing the magic of Christmas into your home with this delightful, and sometimes exhausting, tradition!

Second—with all the thought and effort that you are putting into this little houseguest’s antics, what are you doing to keep track of and preserve them?

A lot of us, especially when we feel like we’ve come up with an ingenious idea, will snap a picture and then share it on social media for everyone to see just how clever and witty we are. But outside of that, once the holiday season is over, all of this hard work is lost to the fleeting audience we shared it with. We have an easy way to change that this year.

With just a handful of products, you can create a mini album for the audience that matters most—your family! You’re already taking the pictures of all the pranks, tricks, and escapades your elf gets up to—and if you don’t already, it isn’t too late to start!—so this project is just another great way to collect and preserve these photos, as well as the fun and happy memories that go with them!

Understandably, sometimes your elf is just too tired from their trip to the North Pole and all he does is find a new place in the kitchen to sit. Take a daily picture anyway! But if a daily picture or daily pose is too ambitious, this type of mini album project can also just include the highlights, together with other holiday pictures you’ve taken. It’s your mini album, so you get to decide what goes into it.

At the end of the holiday season, review all of your elf photos and print out your favorites in a 4″ x 4″ format. This size is easy to crop from a 4″ x 6″ print, and trimming the photos down makes slipping them into one of our mini albums a breeze!

Our 4″ x 4″ albums come with either 16 or 10 built-in protector sheets, giving you space for up to 32 or 20 photos, designed pages, and journaling cards, total. If you want to include more than what is allotted by the album, add a few trusty Flip Flaps™ to the mix!

Flip Flaps are exactly what they sound like—clear pockets with an adhesive on one end that attaches to your albums, allowing the pocket to flip open to reveal additional memories! This exclusive Close To My Heart product comes in a variety of shapes and sizes and is an excellent help for expanding your storytelling and enhancing your memory keeping experience.

We kept our album simple by creating a few pages using patterned papers from our current Mix-in paper packet paired with the North Pole Mail and Merry Elf-mas stamp sets and Thin Cuts, along with a couple of quick embellishments. (See the recipe at the end of this post for a complete list of products used.) The North Pole Mail stamp set provides lots of fun sentiments that fit into a festive frame to pair with your photos. (This stamp can even give you some elf inspiration when you are running short on ideas!)

The Merry Elf-mas Stamp + Thin Cuts makes it easy to stamp and cut out a paper elf that you can use to embellish the cover of your album, accent pages, or use in a variety of other ways. The set is a natural pick for this type of project, and can add the same Christmas magic to other projects, too!

The point of this project isn’t to give you something else to do this holiday season. (No one needs that!) The hope is that this mini project inspires you to preserve what you are already doing! Take advantage of the beautiful products that are currently available for this special time of year and preserve the magical moments you are creating in your home!