It seems that every year, Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier. By this, I don’t mean that the Christmas date of December 25th gets moved, but the day that the ornaments and the decorations and the candies and the general holiday cheer start to pop up at grocery and department stores seems to arrive earlier and earlier each and every year. When I was younger, Christmas “began” immediately after Thanksgiving. Nowadays, the Christmas holidays begin even before Halloween! This gives you even more time to prepare your Christmas scrapbook layouts. After all, there is no shortage of Christmas themes to limit your creativity.
Generally speaking, there are two scrapbooking schools of thought when it comes to the Christmas layout. Some scrapbookers devote a few pages in their normal yearly scrapbook to the pictures of that season while other scrapbookers devote entire scrapbooks to Christmas time alone. Whatever your own thoughts may be concerning that, it is essential to good scrapbooking for you to pick a single Christmas theme, so to speak. Sure, you can post some pictures and decorate your pages with Christmas tree, Santa Claus, candy cane, reindeer and sleigh bell stickers, but in order for your layout to appear consistent and non-overwhelming, you will want to stick with one singular theme. For example, maybe you and your spouse had a child this year, so this will be your baby’s first Christmas. A manger scene theme would work perfectly for this situation. Or maybe this is the year you and your significant other got married. You could have a Christmas tree theme and display pictures devoted to you and your spouse picking out and trimming your first Christmas tree together.
The possibilities for creative borders are endless.
* Why not get that decorative garland you put up for Christmas and trim off a few sprigs from the backside of it? Glue these onto the perimeter of your scrapbook page and glue a few small decorative berries in the middle of the sprigs to create the look of holly.
* Cut out small circles from plain white cardstock and decorate each circle as a different Christmas ornament and line them up around the perimeter of the page. This is a fun way to get your children involved.
* Using natural-colored raffia, cut off pieces about three to four inches long and make small bows out of them and line them up on the borders.
For your Christmas page backgrounds, why not simply cover the entire page with the wrapping paper that you will be using that year to wrap gifts for friends or family? Or better yet, save scraps of different wrapping paper from the gifts you personally received and line your page with these. Underneath your photos, instead of writing directly on the scrapbook page itself (where you would normally journal or list the names of those in the picture), use purchased gift tags that you paste onto the page underneath or beside the picture for your journal entries. Instead of pasting your pictures directly onto the scrapbook page, fold a piece of cardstock in half and cut out a snowflake pattern. Paste the snowflake onto the scrapbook page and paste your picture in the middle of the snowflake. Depending on the size of the scrapbook page you are using, you can cut out a large green Christmas tree shape and paste this in the middle of your scrapbook page. Cut out colorful circles from cardstock and put small pictures inside the circles. These can be your Christmas tree ornaments.
Just remember to have fun and be creative. There is no end in sight as to the different Christmas themes and ideas you can use to create your Christmas scrapbook layout.
