Preserving Christmas Memories

Some of your family's happiest memories are created during the holidays, so it makes sense that you would want to preserve them for years to come.

Anne Marie Barton, the House and Garden expert for About.com, visits The Saturday Early Show to demonstrate some projects your entire family can do together to preserve those holiday memories while creating new traditions.

The following projects have some important elements in common:
They are easy, which means they don't create extra stress for busy parents.
The entire family can participate in each project, which allows you to spend quality time together. And they are all inexpensive.

Family Christmas Albums
Barton suggests compiling special Christmas photo albums that you only take out once a year. She packs her family's albums away with the other Christmas decorations and says that her kids are always excited when the albums resurface in December.

Many of us have photos tossed in a drawer or still stored on a digital camera that we swear we're going to put into albums. With this tradition, at least you're guaranteed to have some photos of your family each year neatly organized and preserved.

Here's what you need to do to start this tradition at your house:

1. Gathering together your pictures from LAST Christmas - Christmas 2003. Obviously, you haven't taken all of your 2004 photos yet.
   
   
2. Buy an album with pockets that you can easily slip photos into. If you buy an album without pockets, the project becomes more of a scrapbook and is much more time-consuming.
   
   You don't have to spend a lot of money on an album; Target offers some attractive ones at a price of two for $12.99.
   
   It's smart to look for albums with acid-free pages, which will prolong the life of your photos. Acid-free pages are fairly standard now; even the Target albums have them.
   
   
3. Once you have the photos and the album, the rest is easy. Let your kids go through the pictures, pick out their favorites and arrange them on the pages.
   
   
4. Barton does like to make a label for her albums to distinguish each year. Again, she does not believe in spending too much time on this - it's supposed to be fun! She prints out BARTON 2004 on her computer, using a vintage-style type. She then cuts this out and adheres it to a piece of rice paper for a somewhat old look. She then slips this into the first pocket inside the album or onto the front of the album, if there's an appropriate space.

Picture Perfect Tree Ornaments
You can also remember holidays past by preserving the photos in an ornament that's hung on the Christmas tree year after year. Here's what you'll need.

• Family photos
  
• Quotes or Christmas sayings, photo-copied onto attractive paper
  
• Pre-cut squares of glass ( 3x3 or 3x4 ) - available at local glass shops for about .10 each
  
• Copper adhesive tape - also at local glass shops, about $6 a roll
  
• Flux (a special liquid that helps the copper adhere to the solder) - buy at Home Depot/Lowes, about $2.50
  
• Solder iron - $13-$15 at Home Depot/Lowes/etc
  
• Solder sticks - these are the silver sticks you melt with the iron, $4
  
• Wire to make ornament hooks, $1.50 a roll
  
• Festive ribbon - .20 a yard

Estimated cost per ornament: $2

Instructions:

1. Put two photos or a photo and a holiday-themed quote back-to-back between two pieces of glasses.
   
   
2. Wrap the copper adhesive around the glass to hold the two pieces together.
   
   
3. Coat the tape with Flux.
   
   
4. Because the tape is not strong enough to hold the glass together, you need to solder the glass together. Soldering irons look like little curling irons. You use them to heat the solder stick, which drips down onto your copper tape, dries and holds the glass together. When you actually see the finished product, you'll realize that you know exactly what a soldered item looks like.
   
   
5. Solder a piece of wire onto the top of the ornament, thread a ribbon through it, and hang on the tree.

A note about soldering irons: Though they get quite hot, they are safe for kids over 12 to use. You do not need to wear any special equipment to operate one.

Barton reminds us to not expect perfection from these ornaments. "The imperfections go along with the vintage look you are trying to achieve," she explains.

Wrapping
If you are heading over to grandma's house on Christmas Day bearing gifts or have other gifts still to wrap and give, Barton offers a creative way to wrap these gifts.

1. Wrap the box in a wrapping paper of your choice.
   
   
2. Choose a favorite photo (if you're giving the gift to grandma, a photo of your kids with grandma would be perfect) and print it off the computer or copy it.
   
   
3. Glue this on top of the wrapped gift.
   
   
4. Create a frame around the photo with ribbon. Barton says that her kids have a lot of fun doing this themselves, and it certainly adds a personal touch to holiday gifts.