A Dot Com Christmas

When did it get to be the week before Thanksgiving? Someone once told me that as we get older, the years go by faster. I was about 10 at the time and one revolution of the earth around the sun seemed to take an eternity...I couldn't wait for time to start moving at warp speed (so I could have my next birthday party sooner)! Now, just as with so many other things, I should have been careful what I wished for!

So the Christmas season will soon be upon us whether we're ready or not! And that leads me to conduct a little informal poll...How many of you do your shopping online and how many hit the "brick and mortar" stores? Feel free to give reasons too! Is it the convenience factor, is it getting the energy and excitement of the season and the other shoppers at the mall? Personally, I tried a little early shopping just yesterday and got so frustrated at the narrow aisles I had to announce to my husband it's looking like a "dot com" Christmas again this year!

One gift my family can count on from me this year is photo gifts (yeah, really...) in one form or another. I've heard people refer to computers as the "digital shoebox", meaning that we get our photos off our digital cameras an onto our hard drives and never look at them again. Maybe we make CD's, but the vast majority of our photos never get printed, let alone made into an album or a scrapbook. People often say that in the event of a disaster, their photos are one thing they would want to make sure they could recover. If those photos are all stuck in a computer though, it greatly reduces the likelihood that they could be recovered. And make no mistake...a hard drive crash (especially on a laptop) is a major disaster! This is why I am defending and promoting the use of albums in all forms!

While I create custom-made albums for weddings, there are literally tons of other easy-to-use consumer album design products out there. Everything from snapfish to picaboo to shutterfly and creative memories. Whether you make one album to highlight a year, or an album for every birthday party, vacation or trip to the zoo we need to make sure our memories are well preserved. Stay tuned...I plan on creating an album from each manufacturer and doing side-by-side comparisons! It should be fun...and all for the sake of research!

I should be keeping pretty busy in the coming weeks...I'm hoping to post some photos from a couple recent weddings, I'm shooting a baptism for baby Meredith right after Thanksgiving, and then proceeding into the Photo Christmas Card Season (which I love by the way)! And maybe I'll even get some shopping in too...better hurry though, the time's gonna fly!

Until I get the weddings photos posted, these are a few shots I took during a hike through the Big Darby State Park just as the leaves were first starting to turn...the second shot reminds me of the opening credits of "Little House On the Prairie"!