Movies often feature scenes where parents get the chance to embarrass their adult children by showing guests all the baby photos they have carefully compiled and kept safe. These memory books can also be a sentimental way to remember someone who has passed away. In other cases, they serve a pivotal role in revealing a significant plot twist. In real life, however, it seems that fewer individuals and families are scrapbooking.
Digital Makes Everything Too Accessible
Anyone can take thousands of selfies and can store them on a handheld device, as long as there’s enough space. This means that photos are ready for viewing anytime the device owner decides. The accessibility of photos makes memories seem less important only because there’s no chance to miss them. You can keep posting about a trip you made a few months back, and it feels like no time has passed.
Your Facebook account also has a time capsule that shows you memories from years before. You can reminisce by reposting them on your timeline and tagging everyone to make sure that they see how they’ve changed in that period. The friends involved in the memory may react for a few hours, but after that, it’s back to living separate lives. Remembering becomes a short-lived and unfulfilling experience.
Memory Books Require Physical Presence
When you’re building the memory book from scratch and adorning it with things like a Memento ink pad, you’re living in the moment. Then, when everything is finished, it can be hidden away until you get together with the people you made memories with. Someone mentions a memory, and you realize that you’ve got the photos stashed away.
You reveal the photos and show how you’ve transformed the memory into something that everyone can enjoy. You’re making new conversation, perhaps even plans. Everyone who wants to see the photos will have to be present at that moment to truly appreciate them. No matter how accessible photos are from your phone, it’s still more fulfilling to connect with people in person and relive memories with them.
Scrapbooking Is Not Just About the Photos
It’s a way of making memories last longer, but it can be more than that. It can be a way to make new memories. Scrapbooking can be a family activity, with you and your children working together to make each page extra special. No matter how young your children are, they can contribute something to the pages. You’ll remember how they scribbled on the edges or stamped each page to their heart’s content.
Hopefully, this tradition lives on, with them becoming parents and scrapbooking with their own children. Compare that to passing on hand-me-down mobile phones to your child, and the magic is gone. They can have the photos you kept on your phone, and they can take it out anytime they want. Still, there’s no other memory attached to it.
It’s not just the artists in the family who should take up scrapbooking. Call it an embellished photo album or a memory book, but it’s a book filled with so much memory, and it reconnects people. You could use a little bit of that in a world where most connections have gone digital.
