It’s a Scrapbook Celebration!
Yes, on May 2, National scrapbooking Day, you can join thousands of other makers of scrapbooks honoring their craft that dates back hundreds of years. Scrapbooks enabled people to preserve all their treasured scraps of news clippings, personal notes, memorabilia, tokens, souvenirs, photos. Literally anything that could be stuck to a page in an album.
My grandma Jenny was the first person I knew who kept a scrapbook. It was a big heavy album with the two covers held together with screws. I would estimate that she started keeping her book sometime in the 1920’s. If we went to her house for a dinner, and the weather was too bad to go outside to play afterwards, we begged her to get out her scrapbook. We would squeeze together on the couch and start looking at her keepsakes. She would tell us about the people in the photos, or explain why she kept things. One of her children died in childhood, and some of the school crafts he made for her had been saved. There were obituaries, and other news articles. Ribbon banners from caskets. One particular newspaper article we relished having her read it to us, featured our father, when he was a young lad, playing with fireworks by the river dock. The explosion caused quite a commotion, because the paddle wheel river boat was docked there at the time. The reporter spared no words on the incident, and what he missed Grandma filled in for us.
I have made more than a few scrapbooks over time, but none of mine carried the charm, and excitement we experienced on the couch with grandma telling her stories about the items in her scrapbook. Perhaps we should put less effort in getting a color coordinated layout, and just start filling heavy paper pages that age over time with lots of tape and paste preserving our stories as life rolls.