you are here: A Year of Us
by Brettani Shannon
This New Year, give your love the gift of cherished memories. Make him a book to remind him of the year’s vacations, holidays, hikes, and even the lazy Saturday mornings that you hold dear to your heart.
Get Creative With What You Have Saved
Secretly create your masterpiece as a gift or gather your special mementos and make a date for you and your partner to make the book together.
Paste photos into an album and accent the pages with ticket stubs from that time at the movies, a dried flower from the bouquet he sent you on Valentine’s Day, the menu from your favorite rainy day dinner delivery restaurant, and your receipt for your contribution to Idol Gives Back that you both felt compelled to join in on.
A fun addition to any scrapbook or photo album is personal photo captions. Make them out of little strips of paper, mini-note cards or sticky notes. The captions can be for more than just photos. If you have a love note that your partner wrote you during the year, remember how it felt to read it for the first time. Write your reaction on a caption note and stick it on the letter in your book.
If you’ve been keeping a love journal or a personal journal and would like to incorporate an entry from it, copy it onto decorative paper paste into your memory book.
If you don’t feel like you have an ample amount of memorabilia and photos for your book, go back to places you’ve had good times this past year and collect them. For example, drive down to a restaurant you guys had a good time at. Take photos of the table where you sat, the bottle of wine you discovered there, or the sign on the outside of the building. Pick up a take-out menu, coaster or business card as well.
Memory Books Can Have A Specific Theme
If the two of you are into a specific hobby, you could make that your central theme. Cut out newspaper clippings having to do with your interest. Get scrapbooking stickers in your theme to decorate your pages and find famous quotes to write in.
Memory Book Cookbook
My boyfriend and I both love spending the night planning out a big meal. We hold hands while we go to the grocery store, pick out everything we need and then go back to his house to prepare and cook it together. This is our first Christmas together and I got him a "scrapbook" type photo album. On the first page I put a torn out recipe from a magazine that we enjoyed one night, and a pictures of us in the kitchen all messy and in the middle of a meal. It became a scrapbook of our relationship, to add more recipes and memories to as we continue cooking through the years together.
--submitted by Ashley
The “Love Book”
My sister-in-law and my brother made a book we all call the “Love Book.” It is full of song lyrics that they have written for each other and photos of them both, some silly, some beautiful. Some are pictures of them together, while some are individual. It is done in a scrapbook style with words like “love” and “forever” scattered throughout. Her husband gets embarrassed when someone new looks through the book, but you can tell that he loves it. We joke that if anyone ever wonders what she’s doing with him, just flip through the book and you will understand.
--submitted by MsNewlywed
Make A Digital Memory Book
Use Microsoft Movie Maker or similar software to turn still photos of the year into a slideshow set to your special song.
PowerPoint is another fun way to compile your photos. You can add animation, notes, captions and sound to your memories presentation. If video is more your style, take clips from home movies and compile them into a home movie montage of your loving family.
