This is it, peeps!! The final post of the final pages of my 2010 Journal Your Christmas/December Daily album. If you've made it this far with me, thank you!! If you've gone into a boredom coma after being bombarded with seemingly endless pages, then it's safe to wake up now. :)
January 4th is the annual "Remember This" entry.
Last year I used it to remind myself that I'd put all the most important Christmas stuff in a plastic tote labeled "Christmas: Open First." It was the most fabulous thing ever for my sanity. The stockings, holders, Christmas card display, and other needed items were right there- no rooting through various boxes to find each one. I could just get that one box down (well, plus the tree and ornaments) from the attic and then pull out anything else I might want later at my leisure.
This year I used the entry to remind myself of several things, including the fact that I like the icicle lights in the tree out front much more than I like them when they're hanging on the front of the house.
January 5th was the "Packing Away" entry.
This year as I took ornaments off the tree and wrapped them up to put away, I made sure that I used color-coded tissue paper for each one. All the purple ornaments are in purple paper, red is in red paper, etc. I decided that if I was going to continue to do my semi-themed tree each year, I should at least make it easier on myself to find the right ornaments.
January 6 was the "holy cow, I can't believe I'm finally finished with this thing" entry.
I used some gift wrap that I bought a few months ago at Paper Source (it's one of my favorites that I picked up there) just to have something a little different.
I have such a massive feeling of accomplishment and relief now that this thing is finally done! This was my third year doing a December Daily type album, and while I'm always excited to start on one, I'm equally excited to be done with it by the end of the year.
Just a quick comparison: last year I posted my final pages on February 18 (so those of you following along who haven't finished yours yet, don't give up!!). This year I'm posting the last pages on January 12. That's more than a month earlier than last year, which I'm sure happened because I decided to use Ali's templates and a standard page size instead of custom-printing the photos to print a different size of page each day. For my next December Daily I plan on doing the pages in a purely digital format, then having it all printed as a photo book when it's finished. That means that I'll have a digital version that I can share each day and not have to continually wait for photos to come back from the printer before I can assemble pages, then photograph and blog them. I hope that means I can actually keep up with the project and not get behind at all!