Christmas Journal, Dec. 1-5.

This Christmas journal has become a holiday tradition all in itself--via Shimelle Laine's annual Journal Your Christmas class. This is my fourth year of making a daily journal through the month of December...I always look forward to getting started!

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this class has helped save Christmas for me. A combination of factors had really soured me on Christmas over the past ten or twelve years, but just taking a few minutes every day to write a little and think a little about the holidays--it's unbelievable what a difference it has made for me and my attitude.

I got off to a late start with my book this year as we were driving back from Ohio on December 1, and I was wrapped up in laundry and chores the next day or two, but here are the first five days, all caught up. Every day you get a journaling prompt in your e-mail, and where you take it from there is up to you. (The photos should be clickable to enlarge, if my writing is too small to read.)

Day 1 is for writing what you want to accomplish in your journal, your feelings about the holiday, whatever:


Day 2 is about snow...the prompt always suggests including a hand-cut snowflake, which I decided to do this year:


Day 3 is about Christmas cards. I included a card that I picked up at T. J. Maxx a couple months ago:


Day 4 is about your ideal or perfect Christmas. It's suggested that you include a photo of some sort, so I took a picture of the little shelf in my foyer:


Day 5 is about Advent. This year I was at church in Ohio for the first Sunday, and my mother did the reading as my nephew lit the first candle on the church Advent wreath. So I included what she read.


This is the album I'm using this year: a spiral-bound 8x8 book from Go West Studios (are they even in business any more?) The cover is etched acrylic with a red liner behind it to show off the holly. At some point I'll do a box for the cover with the year and some sort of decoration.


The last two years I have done very small books with even smaller journaling blocks, and only had room to write a few words for each day. This year I wanted to concentrate more on writing--although I'm finding I still don't have enough room to say everything I want to say!

Journals for 2006, 2007 and 2008 are in the December archives in the blog sidebar (and sometimes in the January archives, too!) for each year, if anybody has time on their hands and wants to look back at the past. Someday I want to combine them all in a Flicker album, but that won't be any time soon!