Day 4 – Dear Santa

I hope you are enjoying your Memorial Day.  This is always a special holiday at our house because we have many veterans in our family, and we are very thankful for them and the many men and women who gave their lives to serve our country.  We usually have a big party to celebrate, and this year is no exception.  Mark and I will be serving up some yummy fajitas this year while we watch the Indy 500 and the race formerly known as the Coca-Cola 600.  Yep, we are big racing fans, and any holiday that lets us share that fanaticism all day long with our friends and family is alright by us!

Speaking of holidays, the prompt for Day 4 was “Dear Santa”, and since I didn’t have any Christmas photos ready to go in one of my project boxes, I had to dig a little deeper.  I could have just thrown together a set of pictures from Christmas Past, but I really wanted to do something a little more meaningful than that, especially after the really quick pages I threw together in the preceding days.  This time, I went back to my own childhood.

I have maybe two pictures total of Christmas from my own childhood.  Sadly, my parents’ house burned to the ground in 1984, destroying most of my childhood pictures, mementos, and family heirlooms.  What few pictures I do have were those that I had taken with me when I moved away from home and those shared by friends and family trying to make up for the loss.  I didn’t want to use the two pictures I did have because they have their own stories, which have nothing to do with Santa, so I decided to be a bit more creative than that – I went searching online for pictures of Christmas icons from my past.  Thus we have “Santaland”, a West Texas tradition that has gone on relatively unchanged for 50+ years.

I spent a lot of time looking for photos for this page, so I didn’t want to spend too much more time in putting it together.  One of the pictures I selected had a horrible color-cast to it, but it was absolutely essential to my memory of the place, so I converted it to black and white. I wouldn’t normally mix color with black and white photos, but it works okay for this and kind of accentuates the fact that Santaland is timelessly unchanged.  The paper, journaling card, and hot cocoa card were from Simple Stories Handmade Holiday paper stack, the title was plastic letters, which I colored with Copic markers, and the candy cane was leftover from some Christmas cards I made back in 2007.  I noticed after I took the photo that you could see the foam squares under the candy cane, so I’ll go back and fix that at some point.

I felt really good about making this page.  It’s not something I probably would ever have thought of if I was just doing straight chronological pages in the story of my life, but it’s definitely an important piece of my childhood that I wouldn’t want to leave out.  This is one of the things I love about doing LOAD with Lain Ehman – she urges us to think about the stories, not the pictures, and in doing so, we capture things that are so much more meaningful than what toy Johnny got for Christmas in 2005.  And isn’t that what scrapbooking is all about?