The final pages from my December Daily album

Yesterday I posted my thoughts about the process of completing my December Daily album on Ali Edwards' blog and she was sweet enough to reply asking to see the remainder of my pages as she thought that my album was beautiful. I was tickled pink!! So for Ali and anyone else who is interested, here are the final batch of pages in my album.....
In the countdown to Christmas, the BBC screened The Nativity at a prime evening slot each night and I absolutely loved watching it. It reminded me of what this month was building towards and was beautifully filmed - I had to include it in my album.

I remembered to document my absolute hatred of the process of wrapping presents! I used one of the gift tags as a journaling spot and just popped it onto one of the D-rings.

A feeling that things were getting on top of me led to this pair of pages giving myself permission to buy ready made rather than have to make everything from scratch!! I journaled my feelings on the tags in the pocket page.

Christmas Eve is frantically busy and I only managed to remember to snap a photo of the mince pies and drink left out for Santa so I included a letter to Santa together with the service book from Midnight Mass and the pages were full before I knew it.

We have a tradition of giving prank gifts each year, some of them are very long-running jokes so I wanted to make sure these were included in my album - no-one else will have a clue what they mean but trust me, its funny!

The traditional shot of the table was a must but I also saved the joke from inside my cracker as I got the same one more than once - how weird was that?

Its a family tradition to spend Boxing Day with my husband's parents and I wanted to capture the feeling of what this day is all about - food, warmth, relaxation, laughter and family.

A last minute surprise gift from my parents meant that my sister and brother-in-law flew in from Canada to spend the rest of the holidays with us. We spent most of the day on tenterhooks waiting for them to arrive and so these pages are heavy on journaling, both visible and hidden.

It was such fun to have a family day trip together for the first time in years and we made the most of it. I had promised my sister an ice cream when she came over to us as we have an amazing local ice cream parlour - little did I know that we would be eating it in the middle of Winter!!

One of my gifts from Canada was a carton of Egg Nog, we just don't get that here in the UK and boy, was it goooooood!! Fortunately my sister also gave me a recipe so I can make my own and what better place to record it than in my album?!

One of the highlights of having my sister to stay was the opportunity to craft together. She gave me the Tim Holtz Tattered Florals Sizzix die as one of my Christmas gifts and so we spent a whole afternoon creating lots of different flowers.

Our days of rock and roll New Years Eve parties are few and far between now and so we opted to have an amazing meal together at home to see in 2011. The highlight of the night was releasing Chinese lanterns into the cold, still night sky and watching as quite literally dozens of them silently floated over the fields from the direction of the town, it was magical.

I ended my album with an entry on 1st January where rather than a resolution I decided upon a word as my mantra for the coming year. I added a cute 'Top Ten' card with a list of my highlights of the month which was a cool way to round things off.

I hope that you like what you see and that it inspires you to consider creating something similar. I highly reccommend visiting Ali's website at www.aliedwards.com - she was my initial inspiration and her site is sure to get your creative juices flowing!

I loved putting this album together and I managed to pretty much stay on top of it each day (with the exception of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day!). The sense of achievement from having stuck it out is incredible and I absolutely love the finished project. In fact I have decided to continue with a scaled down version to record the events of each month throughout this coming year. I have a D-ring 8.5" x 11" album ready to go and plan to complete 4-5 double pages each month documenting the highs and lows. I reckon that way I should end up with a pretty meaty album but not quite as full as this one turned out to be!! Anyway, whatever you decide to create - I hope that you have as much fun as I did with this!!