Christmas in July

A scrapbooker's world is sometimes completely time-warped. Even though I'm currently photographing my kids in the beautiful sunshine of summer, the pages I've been creating lately are of last fall and Christmas! Not many scrappers I know are "caught up", and we all scrap older photos, yet it just feels odd to be preparing winter pages in the heat of summer, and vice verse.

But, memories preserved are completely worth it, and so I continue - even if I feel odd sipping a Super Big Gulp, rather than hot chocolate, while organizing and scrapping Christmas photos!

All of this winter photo organizing has left me a tiny bit pensive, though. This past Christmas was our first without Stephen's grandmother, our children's beloved Babcha. We would have celebrated her 87th birthday this week if she was still with us.

On Christmas Day we set our holiday table with her beautiful China - the wonderfully welcome gift to she gave us on our wedding day. We prepared fragrant, ethnic holiday dishes that originated with her and her ancestors, for our family feast. Yet we set no place at the Christmas table for her. There was definitely a missing element to our gathering. It certainly added a taste of bittersweet to our holiday celebrations.

I now think I know what I am journaling about when I scrap this photo.