You know those moms who carefully document and artistically scrapbook each moment and milestone of their children’s lives? Yeah, I’m not one of them. I wish I were, but I’m just not. My only scrapbooking attempt for my children is for my now-nine-year-old… And his scrapbook ends at age 10 months.

This dust-covered tub is ostensibly staged to become family scrapbooks, but somehow there never seems to be the time, inspiration, and energy to get them done.

But even a non-scrapbooker like myself has managed to start and keep (and even develop) a little bit of a Christmas memory book. I just bought a simple red photo album (mine has a nice red canvas cover) filled with top load clear “pages.” I also bought a pad of Christmas themed 8.5″ x 11″ scrapbook paper and simply filled the pages with it, so each page spread has the same design on the left and right side, but every page spread is different.

At first, I’d just add that year’s Christmas card. [This one from 2006 is funny because I photoshopped my head from another shot where I was standing next to Big Bro… See on the bottom right of my hair there, how it’s green like his sweater? Yep, that’s because this head was taken from another photo. And don’t get me started about whitening teeth and diminishing crow’s feet… Or the year we took our Christmas card photo two weeks after I gave birth to our third child: you better believe I was smoothing out some fat rolls and making my thighs less wide.]

Ahem, but I digress.

Even *I* could keep up with sliding in a copy of our Christmas card each year! The kids love looking back at when they were younger, or when they were babies, etc. And since this book is stored away with the Christmas decorations each year, it is also pulled out again each year, a nice visual reminder for this severely memory-challenged girl!

But now I add a photo of each child and an ornament that he/she received that year. That way, each year when I hang that ornament on the tree, I have the wonderful corresponding photo of how little my precious one was when he/she received it. The extra effort of taking and printing a photo is really kicking it up a notch for me (I know, pathetic, right?), but it is well worth the effort.

Yes, kids, I know: all this picture-taking is akin to torture for you… But you’ll thank me one day… Right??

So, what special Christmas family traditions do you love? Do tell!