Holidays and seasons in your scrapbook

The year has a steady rhythm: hunting for eggs, the first warm evening outside, raking leaves, a shoe by the stove. Precisely because those moments come back every year, it's easy to let them slip. You think: next year, then. With a little planning, you end up with a book where you can see the years side by side, and where each season has its own colour.

A yearly list of moments

Start with a list of what you want to capture every year. Not just the big holidays, but also the little things that belong to your household. Stick it inside the cover of your album or keep it on your phone, so you remember before the moment has passed.

A list might look like this:

• January: the first walk of the year, leftover oliebollen
• spring: the first blossom, Easter, King's Day and the street market, Grandma's birthday
• summer: the first outdoor swim, the holidays, the last day of school
• autumn: leaves, chestnuts, St Martin's Day, the first storm
• December: Sinterklaas, Christmas, New Year's Eve

Also write down the ordinary things that only belong to that season. Picking strawberries, the heating going on for the first time, the bikes going back in the shed. Those are often the pages you look at longest later on.

Easter, summer, autumn and Sinterklaas

Every holiday asks for something different. A handy rule of thumb is to capture three things for each celebration: who was there, what was on the table and one story worth remembering. That way you always have enough for a page, even if the photos are disappointing.

Easter suits light, fresh colours. Take a photo of the Easter table before everyone sits down, and keep a piece of the egg box or the wrapper from a chocolate egg. Children hunting for eggs often make for blurry photos, so take a few of the found eggs in a basket as well.

Summer is about light and being outdoors. Beach photos, the barbecue, an afternoon in the park. Keep tickets from the ice cream parlour or the swimming pool, and put a flat little shell or some sand in a clear pocket or pouch on the page. It's best to give your holiday its own album, so your seasonal book doesn't fill up with a single trip.

Autumn is the season of warm shades: rust red, mustard, orange, forest green and brown. Dried leaves are lovely, but they fade and crumble. Put them in a pocket instead, or scan them and print the scan. If you celebrate Halloween, it's your chance to work with black, purple and grey for once instead of the usual autumn colours.

Sinterklaas is mainly celebrated in the Netherlands and Belgium, so you'll rarely come across him in paper collections from abroad. Luckily, you have plenty of your own material. Keep the poems, the wrapping paper from a surprise, a wish list with a child's drawing or the note that was left in the shoe. A poem fits folded up in a little envelope on the page, so you can unfold it and read it aloud later. Take a photo of the surprises, too, before they're torn open.

If you want to capture the whole of December, you can do that in a separate small album. There's a set format for it, the December Daily, which will get an article of its own.

Seasonal colours and materials

Every season has colours you recognise straight away. Spring: soft green, yellow and pink. Summer: bright blue, white and sunny shades. Autumn: warm earth tones. Winter: white, silver, gold and navy, or classic red with green.

Materials help just as much as colour. Think kraft paper, check patterns and wood grain in autumn, linen and lace in spring, or a little glitter and foil in December. You don't need to buy a complete collection. A few sheets of plain cardstock (sturdy, plain card) in the colours of the season, topped up with leftover patterned paper, is often enough.

Look at your photos as well. If they're already full of colour, keep the paper calm. A photo of a Christmas market with fairy lights doesn't need a red and green background. The other way round, you can give an ordinary photo, of a walk for example, a seasonal feel with a fitting background.

The same holiday, different every year

The fifth Christmas page in a row with a photo of the tree soon feels like a repeat. So choose a different angle every year. A few ideas:

• Capture the moment before the celebration. Start as early as November, with the empty room before the decorations come out of the box.
• Choose one detail and get up close: the hands kneading the dough, the laid plate, the shoe by the stove.
• Let someone else tell the story. Ask a child or an older relative what the best part was and write it down word for word.
• Make a list instead of a story: what was eaten, who was there, what the weather did.
• Take the same photo every year, in the same spot. After a few years, you'll see the children grow and the house change.

That last one might be the loveliest. A set photo by the Christmas tree or on the front step on King's Day becomes, after ten years, a little timeline on a single page.

A year in review or an album per season

There are two ways to organise this. In a year-in-review album, all the seasons and celebrations of one year follow each other. You can see in one book how that year went, and it's a pleasure to read. Write the names of the months or seasons on tabs or on a sheet at the start of each section, so you keep track.

In an album per season or per holiday, you put the years side by side. All your Sinterklaas evenings in one book, all your summers in another. It's especially nice for seeing the differences between the years. A ring binder or post-bound album works best for this, because you can add pages every year.

You can also combine the two: a yearly album for everyday life and one small separate book for the holiday that matters most in your home.

If December is busy, work with small pockets or cards in a pocket album. Each card is a little page in its own right, which you can finish in a few minutes. Do stick to the same colours within one page, though, or it will look cluttered.

Seasonal pages that don't look dated

Paper with big, eye-catching themes looks gorgeous in the shop, but can feel old-fashioned after a few years. That's especially true of busy Christmas prints and trendy colours. A few things keep your pages timeless:

• Use a calm base of plain cardstock, white or kraft, and let the season come back in small accents.
• Choose colours from nature rather than from the latest collection. Autumn leaves will still be orange in twenty years.
• Let the photo do the work. The more the photo says, the less decoration you need.
• Go easy on text that's only funny right now. Nobody will understand a pun from an advert in ten years' time.
• Do add the year and the names, in your journaling or small in a corner. That doesn't make a page dated, it makes it easy to find.

If you do use a bold paper, limit it to a strip, a border or a small flap. That way it doesn't dominate the whole page.

Start with the season you're in

You don't have to wait until January. Take the season you're in now, choose a photo you already have and make one page. Next year you'll make one to go beside it, and that's how the book grows on its own. After a few years, you'll be leafing through a row of seasons that together show what your life looked like.