Memory Keeping Made Easy: Practical Ways to Save and Celebrate Your Memories
You know how everyone has the one friend who remembers everything? They can tell you exactly what you did on a certain day, what everyone wore, and the weather. I am not that friend. I can barely remember 48 hours ago, let alone years ago. But I do like to remember the good times, which means I needed to put systems in place to make that happen.
Before diving in to the systems I have in place, it is important for you to know that I am a “stuff” person. I like things. I like to be able to hold things and see them lined up on a shelf. That said, I’m sure each of these systems below can be translated to digital.
Keep memory boxes to capture important memorabilia.
Collect and store everyday notes
In my closet I have three cardboard boxes that have all of my memorabilia sorted by year. In the past, I have tried to scrapbook, I have tried ticket shadow boxes, I have tried to store everything in binders, but this has been the easiest way for me to manage it. I don’t need to prepare the items before they go into the box, I can easily look through them, and it’s still chronological without being overly strict.
In this box you will find birthday cards (the ones that have more than just a signature in them), pages ripped out of notebooks with scribbled notes, mail received, thank you cards, party invitations, photobooth strips, museum guides, tickets, concert and event programs, maps, conference nametags, coasters, magazine and newspaper clippings, birth announcements, room keys, pictures, and more.
I have a corner of my office where I toss things that I may want to add to this box (or any of the other ones below) and every few months I clear out the pile and file everything away where it belongs. Sometimes I end up throwing things out between putting them in the pile and filing them.
While it sounds like a lot, each year is somewhere between 1.5 inches and 3 inches of material in depth- and I’ve found through the years it’s best if the box is over 8.5 inches wide so that if you need to fit in an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper you just need to fold it in half. Items that are too big I have stored in a random Tupperware container in my closet. The years start tracking in 2013, but before then I just have two lump categories called “early days” and “college” so I don’t need to try to go back and sort things by year. Never let perfect be the enemy of the good enough, especially when you’re just doing it for yourself.
Holiday cards
I used to keep holiday cards that I received in half-sized binders. I know this sounds very specific, but I would keep a large stack of them and then whenever I received three from someone (over the course of three years), I would move their cards to a single plastic sheet protector with their name on it. The cards from senders with less than three stay in the main pile. This wasn’t a great system because (a) people weren’t alphabetized in the binders, it was just by year - so the people I was friends with first were in Christmas binder #1 and then newer friends would be in Christmas binder #4. This made it really hard to sort through things, and (b) it also started flowing into a lot of binders.So I recently made a switch to buying a holiday box (similar to the everyday notes box, except it’s buffalo plaid).
The only tricky part about this is it requires a lot of dividers. I use cardboard dividers (made by the cardboard that comes with stamps when you buy them from USPS online). It doesn’t look as pretty as the binders, but I think I’m heading the right direction. It’s also much easier to browse through old cards, which is especially fun for photo cards. I created a section for my own cards as well so I can easily go back through the years.
When I get three cards from a family and create a specific space for them in my archive, I always send a photo of the cards I’ve been accumulating and let them know that I’m making it. It’s a great excuse to connect and helps people feel special.
When it comes to holiday card mailing lists, I keep a list of everyone who sent me one the year before because after a few years of not hearing from someone they may be worth removing from the list — otherwise it would just continue to grow year over year. Cutting people from this list always feels hard, but if I have data to support that I haven’t heard from somebody in a long time, it feels a little easier. I used to do this in a really big excel spreadsheet that lists (practically) everyone I’ve ever befriended, but I have recently moved to a smaller excel sheet of just folks who I send cards to and then I highlight people in green if I received a card from them that year before I put them away at the end of the season. That way when holiday card season comes around, I can just duplicate the tab and start with last year’s list.
Archive boxes
I love the document storage boxes from the Container Store. A few years ago I bought some to keep around “just in case” and I’ve ended up using them for three purposes:
Wedding Stuff - Every bridal shower card, wedding card, and wedding communication I sent is in this box. It is not sorted, just thrown in. When I want to find something I just dump out everything and shuffle through the pile until I find it. Then I cross my fingers that everything fits back in. (I did get rid of the cards that only had a signature on them, but it’s still a pretty full box.)
Inspiration - This is a box of paper items that I really appreciate. They are well-designed, may be something I’d like to create some day, or have an image that inspires me. It has items like calendars; magazine and newspaper clippings of architectural items, outfits, or scenes with good energy; cards and magazines; impressive marketing materials; art prints; zines; business cards; conference booklets; and stationery.
Things I’ve made - I found it was useful to have a box to store little art projects that I really liked or copies of cards that I’ve printed and sent out. When I go through this box it reminds me that I am a creative person and will (probably) continue to be creative in the future. It has drawings, table setting cards, zine pages, wedding communications (these are apparently in two places, but man they were cool), cards, calendars, postcards, menus, BINGO cards, and stickers.
Theater shows
One thing about theater programs is that they do fit nicely in a half-sized binder. (There’s even an official Broadway one.) Through the years I have gone back and forth on how many theater programs to save. Do I just save the ones from Broadway? Do I save musicals and plays? Do I save concert programs here too? (I had a lot.) At some point I seemed to have gotten rid of everything that wasn’t Broadway. That may have been a mistake, but here we are.
One thing I do to make this amount of paper more manageable is that I rip out the inside of each booklet and just save the cover sheet. No part of me is going for pristine, just the memories. I also rip out the page of who was in the show when I saw it and slide that and the paper ticket (if I have it) into the same plastic sheet protector.
On a related note, I also recently started a database in Notion that lists all of the Broadway shows and concerts I have been to, so if I ever get feisty again and start throwing things out, I’ll still have a list. I do wish I kept a list of the choir music I’d sang through the years though, that would have been good to have.
Wedding stuff
Beyond my own wedding stuff, I have all of the wedding communications from every other wedding I’ve been to. (I hit wedding number 45 earlier this year!) These things also do pretty well in a binder. Each wedding has its own plastic sheet protector. Sometimes if there’s not that much stuff, I put two weddings in one sheet protector, one facing the front and one facing the back. In each plastic sheet is the save the date, bridal shower invitations, the wedding invitation, programs, name cards, table photos, and thank you cards. I’m now up to four wedding binders. These are so fun to go back and look at! (Especially as a stationery lover.)
Love notes
Does everybody have a box of love notes in the top of their closet? On my sabbatical I wrote a personal book (of which there are only two copies) called “A Box of Letters“ that references this box of love notes in the top of my closet. It has cards, love letters, room keys, notes, and stories I’ve captured from elementary school through current times. This is probably the box I would grab in case of fire. While I try to pitch myself as a data driven, systems girl (as seen from this blog post), I’m really just a nostalgic romantic at heart.
Print and display photos from your favorite moments.
Fridge photos and photo albums
I’m a physical photo girl. I love to hang them places. I love to send them to people. And honestly, if you wait for a sale, you can get them printed for a penny each from Snapfish or Shutterfly. (I’ve also used Artifact Uprising to print, but those are fancier and more expensive.)
Every few months, I go through my newest phone photos and choose the most memorable ones to print. I print a copy for myself and extra copies for anyone else in the photo (a great excuse to send snail mail and at a penny a print, why not?). When people send photos after an outing, I always email them to myself so that I remember to add them to a folder on my desktop called “To Print” that always has photos in it for next time.(At the end of every year I pull all of my phone photos onto my computer and then also save it on a physical hard drive. I’m going to start going back through the “To Print” photos to make sure I’m saving the ones that aren’t my own, too.)
When I print a new batch of photos, I remove the old fridge photos, put them in loose chronological order, and file them away in photo albums on my living room shelves. For every 6 months, I probably print 20-35 photos for myself.
Scrapbooks
I know I already mentioned this above as a failed option for myself, but I did in fact use to be a big scrapbooker. It’s how I got into cardmaking because I already had all of the supplies. I would stay up late into the night designing page layouts, finding the perfect embellishment, and writing memories in the margins. While I love the old scrapbooks I have, I have found that I prefer to store items in a more practical way now. Or honestly, maybe I just ran out of time to put in the effort and by the time I would get things printed my motivation would be gone.
The last scrapbook I made was from my first work project. I traveled back and forth to Louisiana for three years and near the end of the engagement I went through and printed photos, saved notes and room keys, and wrote memories in the margins. It’s one of the few items that really captures what that time of life was like and I had so much fun sharing it with my co-workers.
Customize your screensavers
During the pandemic I kept thinking I needed to find a better way to appreciate old photos, so I created a bunch of desktop backgrounds with photos through the years. I literally just went in chronological order and put about 40 photos in one background image after creating a template the same size as my desktop background (leaving a clear space for my icons on the left side). They weren’t the prettiest backgrounds as I just put all of the photos in a literal timeline from upper left to bottom right, but it was a great way to see a lot of photos at once and remember a very specific time in life.
I keep wanting to go in and figure out how to choose the photos for Google TV when its in screensaver mode, maybe this post will be the motivation to do that. It’s really easy to do, I just need to spend the time going back through my photos to see which ones have that screensaver vibe. (Probably some European vacations, the far and few between nature trips, and artsy local skylines.)
Create a photo wall
I’m not in love with my execution of this idea yet, but a few years ago I started printing every photo of my husband and I and using painters tape to tape it to a wall in our bedroom. They are in chronological order and have taken over half of a large wall at this point. It’s fun to go back and look through all of the memories. While I love the ease of putting them up with painter’s tape, they often fall down when the temperature changes and I can’t ever make them quite as straight as I want, but for right now, the intention of it is good enough. Years ago, I had a version of this in my office that I really liked. I think that printing all of the photos to the exact same square size with a fancy border (thanks to artifact uprising) helped in making it look more cohesive.
Digitizing old photos
While this isn’t a system for how I store memories, technology can be key to getting something done efficiently and effectively. A few years ago, I finally bought a good scanner to convert physical photos to digital ones. It was admittedly pricey and I only used it a few times, but being able to digitize the memories I did in a quick and easy way was absolutely worth it. I also used it to scan choir music and have also been telling friends that if they need to digitize old photos, to let me know and they can borrow it. Years ago I had old video camera footage converted to digital as well. While it was a bit of a process, I was able to find a local shop that could do it, which was great because I had a real person to ask questions. (If you’re in Philly, it was the Photo Lounge.) It’s wild to see snippets of life from high school all over again.
Capture moments you don’t want to forget to cherish later.
Document everyday life
Out of everything I’ve said in this post already, this is probably the most important thing. I realize every time I try to show somebody a picture of my childhood house, try to explain what my high school uniform looked like, or wonder what my college dorms looked like, I wish I had captured more. It’s one of the reasons that doing the “a day in the life” Instagram prompt was so great years ago, because you were able to capture what a whole day would look like. I recommend taking the time to do this.
Most notably, I lived in my last house for nine years. About 6 months before I moved out, I went through the entire house and took dozens of photos of everything, making sure to focus on my favorite spaces and details. I then printed these photos in a book. Before I sold the house, I got all the walls painted white (per a recommendation from my realtor) and I didn’t realize that this would make it IMMEDIATELY feel like it was no longer mine. I’m so glad I have the photos I have.
Take some time to document your day-to-day life so you can go back to it if you need to, especially the little moments, spaces, and the people that bring you joy.
Capture family holidays
Another thing I’m so glad I did was capture family holidays on video. In 2017, I made it a point to take short 5-30 second videos of the Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas holidays. I edited them together and put music behind them. It was one of the last years we did the holidays with the whole family (pre-Covid life, man) and I’m so glad I have the videos to be able to go back to and share with my own child, especially since my grandfather has passed away since then. Take the traditions that you love and capture them to keep them with you always.
Another thing I did was to create a short ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas book of our family holidays (pre chat GPT, thank you very much). I printed them as holiday gifts for the family as well. It’s always fun to share this with folks when I try to explain what the Italian American Seven Fishes dinner looks like.
Use social media
This one is iffy. Social media is a wild, overly-political monster. BUT. If we take something like Instagram and go back to its start, it was to document everyday life. When my son was born, I started a private Instagram account for him and I love being able to scroll back and look photos when he was younger. It’s wild how quickly you forget it!
I also used the 1 Second Everyday app for a while and LOVED the outcome. I unfortunately don’t have the commitment to doing the same thing every day — even with the reminders. But the compilations from the app that I do have, I really loved.
The thing to note is that you don’t own this content though. I mean, you own the original photos, but if the system goes down or changes, you may lose access to things in the way you had them. For a decade, at the end of every year, I would print my Instagram photos in a book from Artifact Uprising and go back in and write in each of the captions. This way, I still had the content, even if anything happened to the app. In addition, I printed all of my blog posts that I removed from online before 2017 in a book. While that content is no longer available on the internet, it’s still part of my story.
Final Thoughts
Your first thought might be, how often do you actually go back and look at these things? Great question. A lot of when I go back and look through things is when I am updating them. For the boxes of cards and binders of programs and wedding memorabilia, I look through at least some of them every few months when I add to the folders. The love notes has to be more of a special occasion, but always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
I look at the printed photos on my refrigerator and my wall every night. I look at the old printed photos every few months when I print new ones to put on the refrigerator. The screensavers I saw every time I turned on my computer. The scrapbooks I didn’t find myself going back to look at, which might be a reason I stopped making them. The everyday life memoirs and holiday videos, I also go through less periodically, but knowing that those moments are captured brings me comfort. Social media I scroll more often, because it’s easier to scroll your own account than others’ because you know what you’re going to find.
I definitely in general have more systems in place for “stuff” around the house, but that begs the question of when you officially switch from memory keeping to logistics management. I have a filing cabinet for important documents, music storage, a Google spreadsheet that I use as a relationship tracker, a felt pendant that I put my enamel pins on, etc. These are just systems I have in place to sort through items I own, as opposed to really focusing on capturing a memory.
And not everything has a system yet. For example, I have a large stack of coasters just sitting on my desk because I think I’m going to want them one day from random bars I’ve visited, but there’s no rhyme or reason to it just yet. Systems are built over time to be what they need to be and they change as your collections grow. It’s a slow burn and you’ve just got to find the one that works best for you.
In my own memory keeping journey, the next thing to figure out will be capturing memories of motherhood and my son’s life. I (obviously) have a document storage box for him with all the cards he’s received to date, I’m attempting to write down key statistics in a month-by-month book (but have already missed at least one), and I have a month-by-month photo frame, but I do feel like I should be doing a little bit more. Maybe writing letters? Maybe printing more photos? Whatever I come up with, it needs to fit into the systems I already have in place and be easily repeatable.
I’d love to hear what has worked well for others as well!
