Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Taking Care of Business

My family has been sending out a Christmas newsletter since 1986. My mom was usually the one who would write our family letter, but Dad was the one who would spend so much time meticulously tweaking it to be a work of perfection!

My dad died in January of 1999, so after that my mom took over writing the newsletter. I consider myself to be somewhat of a historian, and I have a passion for documenting my life/my family's life through my blog, journals, personal history, photo books, slideshows, etc. In 2006 I asked my mom if I could try my hand at writing our family's Christmas letter. Things get so busy, especially around the holidays, so I thought it would be something I could do to pull my weight! ;) Actually, I thought I would be able to do a good job, and I have to say I do a great job!

So for the past six years I've been writing our family letter. Now I'm the meticulous one! I always try hard to make a quality newsletter that is as aesthetically pleasing as it is interesting. My mom says that I have my dad's artistic flair in this arena, and I'd like to think and that I'm channeling some of my dad's energy when I'm working on it! As much as I enjoy writing it, it always feels like such a chore, so I'm always relieved when I just bite the bullet and get it done!

*As I said, my family has been sending out a family newsletter for the past 25 years. The neat thing is that we have a copy of each one. Writing a family newsletter doesn't take too long since it's only once a year, but it's a great way of keeping a record of what your family was up to at a certain point in time.

The other project I've been devoting lots of time to lately is my 2011 Year in Review – a slideshow of pictures/video clips of my family throughout the year. I started doing this two years ago after my friend Nate told me about making a Year in Review for his family each year. (And he'd gotten the idea from one of his classmates.) When he was telling me about his slideshow, I LOVED the idea. As I've said, documenting my life is right up my alley, but I hadn't ever dabbled in audio/visual documentation, so I thought I would give it a try. My first Year in Review in 2009 turned out really well for a first attempt and 2010's was even better than the first since I had more experience.

I'm hoping my 2011 Year in Review will be even better still. I bought a new slideshow program this past summer called ProShow Producer (made by a company called Photodex) and although it cost a pretty penny, I loved what this program is capable of doing so that's why I decided to shell out the money for it. Well, it's back to work for me!

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