Now that we are a few weeks into 2022, it’s a good time to think about how you want to approach memory keeping for the year ahead. You don’t have to have a full fledged plan at this point, but it’s nice to think about some general ideas.

I realized the other day that the photo I’ve been using for my “about” page (now updated) was from 2016. Somehow, 2016 was six years ago! How did that happen? I decided I better update it with a new one so I took a quick selfie using portrait mode on my iPhone. I’m trying to be better about getting in front of the camera this year so it was a good exercise.

I feel like my year has gotten off to a slow start. My daughter and her husband got colds at Christmas and were unable to travel to see us for the holidays. They were well enough to join us on January 5th and we finally had our Christmas with them on that date. Then we celebrated a belated New Year’s on January 6th. Better late than never! I’m finding that the date on the calendar doesn’t mean that much these days. It’s more important to just enjoy the moments when you get them.

I don’t really feel ready to start the new year until I get my last roundup done from the previous one. It felt good to finish up December of 2021 and know that I did a roundup (and scrapbook pages) for every single month last year! This is a habit that I love so much and that really makes my memory keeping a lot easier.

Here’s what our December looked like:

We made it through another year! If you’ve been doing roundups all year long, this will be your final one of the year and you will be all ready for a year-in-review album or journal entry. December is so rewarding for the roundup schedule because even if you haven’t been doing them each month, you can still take this as an opportunity to reflect on the year that has just ended. There are tons of recap news articles and Best/Worst lists for the year. Be sure to save those and use them in your journaling!

I’m personally grateful to be at the end of this calendar year and to turn a new page into 2022. Here’s hoping it’s full of health and happiness!

Now I’m ready to use my roundup prompts to document the month. I also love creating scrapbook layouts using these topics, but there is no right or wrong way to do this. Just record the main events of November and find somewhere to share and enjoy them!

I happen to love year-end reviews because they give me so much material to use for recording our memories of the year. Of course, they are a lot more fun to read when the news is better than it has been over the past year, but it’s still important to take some time to reflect on what has been happening around us in the world. It’s also a great way to jog your memory to think about what was happening in your own life that coincided with these events. I’ve been saving links to some great resources as I find them, and I will continue to update this list if I see anything else worth adding.

What do you do to celebrate New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? We don’t usually do anything too major, but I kind of enjoy that. Our big focus is mostly on having good food to eat. lol! Since New Year’s is just a few days way, it seems like a good day for a blog post all about how to make New Year’s celebration fun and memorable!

I’m going to be taking this week off from blogging so I can have a little extra holiday time. I’ll be back on December 27th and I have lots of great stuff planned for the new year. I hope you have a happy holiday season!

I have an annual tradition of sharing our Christmas tree here each year. I’ve been doing this since 2013, which was the first year I started changing the theme of our tree each year. If you want to peek at the previous years, here are the links: