A December Journal, One Line a Night
for December Daily, or just for December
December is the month people most want to keep and have the least time to keep it. The lights go up, the school concert happens, someone burns the first batch of cookies, and by the twentieth the days have blurred into one long errand.
If you make a December Daily album, the tradition Ali Edwards started, you know the shape of the problem exactly. The photos are easy. The words are the part that piles up. By the time the album gets made, the twelfth is a photo of a tree and no memory of what happened around it.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Finally fixed the wobbly chair. Took four minutes.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
Keep the words as you go
Little Memory is a little diary for your iPhone, and it is sized for a December evening. A reminder arrives at the hour you pick, you write one line about the day, and that’s it. About fifteen seconds. Add the day’s photo if you have one.
Dec 3. Maya picked the crooked tree on purpose. Dec 9. Office party, left early, no regrets. Dec 14. First snow, nobody’s boots fit.
When the album gets made in January, the lines are there, dated, in your own words, ready for the journaling cards. The album holds the pictures. The app held the day.
It isn’t only for the album
Plenty of people keep a December journal with no scrapbook at the end of it, just because it’s the month they’d like to remember. That works too. And the lines don’t disappear on the 31st: next December, the app shows you what you wrote on this date the year before, and the year before that. Last year’s crooked tree. The snow. The boots. That’s the album reading itself back to you.
Missing a few days is fine
Most December projects end on the day the first gap appears. This one doesn’t mind. Skip the seventeenth and the eighteenth still counts. Start on the tenth and the tenth is where it starts. There’s no catching up, because a line about tonight is all tonight asks for.
For the rest of the year
The same habit works in June. People who come for December tend to keep going, because fifteen seconds is small enough to survive an ordinary Tuesday. If you do a Week in the Life, it’s the same idea with a shorter calendar.
There’s more on keeping memories without a craft table, and on the on this day part, which is where December pays you back. Or take the little tour.
