This year I’m doing Shimelle’s famous Journal Your Christmas class online for the first time. I am hoping it will inspire me to unpack and organize my scrapbooking stuff and maybe get a few layouts done along the way. I love the whole idea of the Christmas Journal - a way to look back every year on our holidays and have a concrete visual reminder of all that was magical. I’ve felt like Christmases past were some of the very most magical times in both my young life and my adult life and I hope to create those memories for my kids as well. In the last few years, however, my holidays have been miserable, I’ve been miserable. I feel like I’ve sort of gone through the motions, at best. I’ve let other people’s actions dictate how I move through life in general and none of that has been more painful to me than during the holidays. I refuse to lose another holiday even though, believe me, people in my life are trying very hard to take it away from me.

Today is day one of Journal Your Christmas and the assignment is to create a manifesto. I love Shimelle’s Manifesto this year but last year’s really speaks to me and since I didn’t do JYC last year, I’m going to go with that one:

Manifesto: Noun. A declaration of one’s intentions.

Starting December first, I will keep a Christmas journal. In it, I will write something every day to reflect on the holidays of my past, enjoy the holidays of the present and dream about the holidays of my future. To some, this will be a stack of papers and trivial scribbles, but not to me. I am taking back my Christmas, I am letting it be something I relish and, most importantly, I am giving at least fifteen minutes every day to myself no matter how crazy this season becomes. I hope you will share, encourage and understand as I make something with my own hands, my own words and my own memories. 

So today I take back my Christmas.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Crafty, Holidays & Vacations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.