A Half Century of…

For years I have talked about making a Christmas book of all the Christmases we have had together which was 49 last year. Every so often I would get a few pictures organized and then would lose track of them and more years would go by. Several years ago I bought a program that scanned my old slides into my computer.  This year I’ve tackled the never ending boxes of photos.  I sorted through boxes and boxes of pictures and put them somewhat in order. Then I started scanning and editing and uploading to Walgreens. I tried Snapfish and it was sooo slow. Then I tried Walgreens and it was lightning fast so I that’s who I decided to use. It took time, lots of time, to figure out how I wanted to arrange them, write what I wanted to write and choose which pictures I wanted to used.  I liked the backgrounds Walgreens had but didn’t like them not having embellishments you could add. And just like magic about half way through they added a new feature…embellishments! So of course I had to go back and add some. Then, for some reason most of them disappeared! I already had a bunch in my “folder” and they were okay but I wish I had grabbed more while they were there!
Anyway, it turned out like a timeline of our life together and just amazed me to look at the screen of all the pages at once. I mostly have a page for each year and hit the highlights – where we lived and when we moved. The birth of our sons…and then our grandsons. I took a screenshot to show you!

For some reason I had trouble with  a few ‘90s years so I consolidated those. I wanted to use a picture of our old house in Ohio as a background for a page and it just wouldn’t work so I just made the page in Photoscape in an 8 x 8 size and uploaded the whole thing and OH MY GOSH…hindsight.  That’s the way to go. This was an edit so all the pages were done by then!

Then I just added some more writing and embellishments once I uploaded it. I wanted the borders of the pictures to show with dates on a few but most were cropped.

See the Santa in the wagon? It was from my son’s great grandparents that year…

for his first Christmas – 1967. ( Flashcube picture!)

Here he is three years later in 1970 with the Santa.

And here’s my grandson 31 years after that  in 2001 with the old Santa. There’s Big Lilly – she always wore a pink bow. That’s something else I worked in…all of our dogs.

1980 – I couldn’t find a family picture so I used one of those we had taken at one of those dress up studios where you don’t smile and added a frame and holly and used it. I do have a picture of our tree from every year from ‘65 to 2013.
I can’t wait to get this book and now I’m regretting not shipping 2 day but after all the work I ordered the lay flat extra thick pages, custom cover and I had 44 pages which made the shipping double so the whole thing got pricy even with 40% off it was $70. I’ll add one page on the back cover next Christmas so the title will be true…A Half Century of Christmases!
Joining Beverly at How Sweet The Sound for Pink Saturday and Show and Tell Friday.  You should, too!
xoxo Nancy