Photo Calendars Become Keepsakes

Happy New Year 2026!

How do you use calendars?

Do you have a central online calendar for family or business used to track all of your appointments, tasks, activities, birthdays, vacation?

Or do you prefer a wall calendar for your central hub?

Perhaps you use a combination approach.

I personally use varying calendar platforms for different purposes.

For the tyranny of the urgent and tracking all of the appointments, kids’ activity schedules, business meetings, etc. I use an online calendar. It is on my phone and readily available when I need it at the doctor’s office or to set up a coffee date with the friend I ran into at the store. It is very convenient and necessary for me to have that digital calendar readily available.

But I love my paper calendar, too!

The act of writing by hand just hits different. I write down the big connection points on my paper calendar, not all the mundane daily stuff that coordinates the chaos of modern life. My physical calendar is visual, aesthetic and I can be creative with it by using different colored pens, adding stickers, etc. The calendar itself holds memories when made using our family’s favorite photos from the past year.

It is like making a family yearbook a day at a time.

I use my paper calendar as a keepsake, and I’ve held on to my old calendars over the years. When I flip through them, I can see where we’ve been and what really mattered to us in each season. I still don’t know how I managed a household with six kids and survived, but it’s all there in those pages—right alongside the photos of my kids when they were little. Those calendars are precious to me. And yes, I’ve scanned and digitized some of them already. One of my goals this year is to scan the rest and add those pages into my photo hub sorted by year and month so they sit next to the photos taken that month. That way, even if I never go back and write detailed captions for every photo, there’s still a written record of what life looked like then—little clues that give the memories context.

In my work, I often see families with boxes of photos and meaningful papers who don’t want to lose the stories, but don’t know where to start. Sometimes all it takes is putting a few pieces side by side for the memories to come back into focus.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by photos, albums, or boxes of memories you don’t want to lose, I’d love to help. My work is about gently sorting, preserving, and bringing those pieces together so your stories can be seen, remembered, and shared.