Document December with Bethany: My Kit

November and December are BIG at my house.  Ever since the kids were little I have enjoyed creating some special traditions with them.  We live far from family (16 hours from my in-laws and 3 hours from mine) so we spend a lot of holidays at home together, just the 4 of us.  I don't want the kids to regret the lack of time with extended family, so we always make some BIG memories together.

For example, two of the traditions we have are a bit involved, time consuming and complicated, but boy are they fun!

Countdown Tradition:  Every year I plan something fun for every day in December.  It can be as big as going to see a Christmas show or small as making a hot chocolate bar to enjoy a cozy drink.  I write them all down on little tags and I put them inside of 25 little stockings that we hang across our mantle.  Each day the kids pull one to see what our special time will be.  It gets complicated to juggle, but we all love it.

Themed Dinner Tradition:  Each Friday in December we do a themed dinner.  Some years we do a different country each week and learn about that country, eat food from there and do a craft to remind us of it and hang on our tree.  Other years we pick a special Christmas movie and plan a meal and game around it.  Whatever we pick, it is always super fun!

Can you see why I would want to get all of these memories down on paper?  But every year I plan to document what we do and every year I make it a few days in and quit.  UGH!  LOL  Too busy having fun, I guess.  This year I AM ON IT!  Whoop!  Whoop!

I started with this little beauty.  I love the size of it (5x7 pages).  Nice for some lightly decorated pages...add a photo and a sentence or two and you are done!  It is easy to add things to it as well and the colors are great.  SOLD!  LOL

Next I pulled out all of my Christmas supplies.  I sort of kind of have two boxes of them.  Every year I look for the *perfect* collection to do projects with.  Then I buy it.  Then I don't use it.  Then I end up with this:

Hey!  They are some cute paper pads!

I am lite on themed embellishments, but I know I have a lot of things I can pull that will work well in my kit.  Ready?  Let's go "shopping"!

For my paper, I picked a creamy yellow to cut some additional background papers, so I can have enough to last the whole month.  This will also help me pick the color pallet of papers I want to use.

Picking the papers was not as hard as I thought.  I automatically knocked out the majority of my paper based on the color scheme I was going for.  I want to keep it bright and fun!  That left me with some Echo Park and some College Press paper I have had in my stash for a while.

I pulled a few of my Christmas Embellishments that would work and then just worked my way around my room looking for anything fun in that color pallet.

I ended with a few stamps, because I just can't help but put some in...and I added a star stencil and some paste as well to play with for some texture.

Not bad!  Not bad!  I am left with a very fun and bright kit that made me think of one of my favorite movies, Meet Me in St. Louis.  Remember that song at the end...Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas?  Well, take a look at my Merry Little Christmas kit.

I'll be back tomorrow to show you some finished pages in my album...keep your fingers crossed for me!

As always, we would LOVE to see what YOU are working on, so please head over to Mr. Linky, upload a project and give us something fun to inspire us!

Happy Holidays!  

Warm hugs from Bethany and the rest of the Master Forgers!