It can be hard to find meaningful gifts for your family in the run up to Christmas. Your children probably have a wish list as long as their arms, but what about your parents and in-laws, who seem to have everything they need already. One thing that everybody uses is a calendar and a perfect way to make it meaningful and personalized is to produce one yourself, using special pictures that you’ve taken of your children over the year. These calendars make wonderful gifts for anyone who is close to your family.
Photoworks has a very simple and easy to use program for designing your own calendar and as they are known for the excellent quality of their printing you are sure to get beautiful results. How you design your calendar is up to you. You can just choose thirteen great photos of your kids and leave it at that. Or you could decide to get more creative and choose a theme. Here are two suggestions, but you can do whatever your imagination suggests.
Following the seasons: Seasonal pictures make sense in a calendar and you can highlight the seasons with your choice of photos of your children too. January and February could have photos of them playing in the snow, or all muffled up in winter clothes splashing in puddles. For the spring months look for photos you’ve taken of them picking spring flowers or on an Easter egg hunt. Summer photos will be easy to find – just sort through your vacation pictures for some great shots of your kids on the beach or at the pool. Fall colors and Halloween pictures come next, and then we are back with winter scenes and of course a Christmas picture for December. You don’t have to restrict yourself to pictures that you’ve taken over the last year. You could include a cute baby picture of your child’s first Christmas several years ago or get nostalgic with toddler pictures of your now school age children.
Family occasions: For this idea you could set up a series of photos of your kids especially for your calendar. Write down a list of important family birthdays and anniversaries. Divide them up month by month and then get older kids to design colorful hand-written notices saying things like “Happy Birthday Grandma” or “It’s my Birthday!” or “Happy Easter”. Find some occasion to remember for each month and if there are more than one make a separate notice for each one. Then take fun photos of your kids holding up the notices with big smiles. Choose different backgrounds for each photo and have the kids change clothes between shots. You can have some photos with two or more children in and others with just one of them, but make sure that they each get the same number of photos of themselves in the calendar, they are bound to count! Only do all this if it sounds like fun for all of you – you want the kids to look like they are having fun too! Once you have put all the photos together you’ll have a really personalized fun family calendar to remind everyone of all the important dates throughout the year.
After all this work putting photos together you will probably want to order yourself a copy of your gorgeous calendar as an early Christmas gift too, and until 16th November Photoworks have a special offer giving two calendars for the price of one, so get creating calendars now!
Mum and Photographer
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