And what I wish I’d done differently over the years, if only I could go back and change it…

For the last 6 years I’ve been filming our own Christmas in various ways, and while I love what we have created I have two big regrets.

1. I wish I’d started earlier. I learned video way way before I started creating Christmas films of our family – so there was no good reason why I wasn’t doing it. Maybe I hadn’t really seen the idea yet? I think the brutal truth is that I was looking for perfect in those early years. I had a rough time for a few years after having the boys and Christmas wasn’t perfect. At that point I was busy trying to hold it all together and I hate to admit this, but I did mainly just photograph things that looked perfect, and as we all know it’s even harder to create all perfect on film, it is desperately revealing.

We also bought a very old house and did A LOT of renovation work when the boys were super young which took a couple of years, and in that time I didn’t really take any pictures at home because it didn’t look good enough!
I wish I’d started earlier, and I wish I had embraced all the imperfect elements – seriously I can not stress this enough, if you have young kids, start yesterday!

2. I wish I had included more voices and real audio, for two reasons. I obviously wish I had their young voices captured to enjoy forever. But I also wish I had been intentional about the audio because a really hard hitting part about video is you watch it back and do sometimes hear your kids say things like “are we done taking pictures yet” or me saying “please just do that one more time, then we can more on”… it’s not nice to be confronted with 😉
So get your kids chatting, read a book to your kids, talk about pictures you are looking at, ask them what they want for Christmas, what they like the most etc… just instigate chat that’s great to listen back to…

What I have been filming and photographing

I’m a big believer that our tiny little traditions become the cornerstones for childhood memories, so I am intentional about capturing those. I always record some footage when we go and get the tree and decorate it. The excitement the boys show when seeing the decorating come back out of the boxes is always a joy!

I love filling some of the baking and cooking. Maybe it’s just cookies, maybe it’s the ginger bread house.
Of course I take pictures too, but these are mainly on Christmas day. I don’t do much video on Christmas day, too much going on and I’m always cooking!

I always print a handful of Christmas pictures every January, they go in a box and that box comes back out every year. It now has 8 years of images, and again I just wish I’d started this tradition earlier.

What are your traditions? How do you capture your Christmas? It really doesn’t have to be perfect, just document it from as early as possible… Happy Christmas x