For some people, a family holiday is a rare occurrence. Trips abroad can be incredibly expensive, especially when you have a large family, so it can take years of saving up and planning before you finally have the time and money to make your dream a reality.
Those fortunate families who have a large income and no financial worries might take extravagant trips every other month, but whether you’ve taken a luxury vacation on a cruise, or if you’ve spent the weekend camping, there’s no doubt in my mind you’ll want to remember your family holiday forever. After all, it’s not how much money we spend on holidays or where we go that matters the most – but spending time together and living in the moment.
Time spent on holiday flies by fast. Before you know it, you’re on your way back home with a sunburn and a looming sense of dread about going back to work on Monday. But just because your trip is over, that doesn’t mean you have to forget about it. It’s one of the most important family occasions you will ever have, so don’t you want to make sure that you can all reminisce about it for years to come? You also want to be able to share your memories with friends and family who couldn’t be with you, so these tips will apply to that too.
Here are three great ways to help you remember your family holiday forever.
Print photographs when you get home
You will no doubt take a vast quantity of photos on your holiday, but once you get back home you want to be able to look at them all the time. Don’t just leave them on your phone or stored in the cloud. We all have thousands upon thousands of pictures stored somewhere digitally, and how often do they stay fresh in the mind? Go through your photographs, pick your favourite ones, and have them printed out professionally. You can then frame them, using a company like Best4Frames, and put them up in prominent places around your home. This way you will be reminded of your amazing trip every single day. A gift of a framed photograph is also a lovely touch for close family, like grandparents or family who are getting older and would love to share your memories..
Let the kids take photos and get involved too, it’s not about the quality of the photos at the end of the day, but bringing back memories behind them. Another alternative I love is the idea of making photobooks. It’s now relatively inexpensive to get your photos printed into a book that commemorates each year. This lets you easily flip through them and share the experience with friends and family too. You can also all dress up in fancy outfits, with your little kids wearing baby tuxedos for boys and formal dresses for girls to make the photos more memorable and special.
Make a video
As well as taking photos, you could go one step further and make a video of your trip. Taking videos these days is a lot easier than it’s even been before. Pretty much any smart phone or camera these days has good video quality, so there’s no need to lug a giant camcorder around. Take lots of short videos every day, and you can find loads of free video editing apps that you can download to your phone that are incredibly simple and intuitive to use. This way you can compile your entire holiday into a fifteen or twenty minute bite size reel. You and your family can sit down in front of the TV every now and then to relive the fun times.
Keep a journal or scrapbook
It’s amazing how quickly memories prompts can fade away, but you can keep a permanent record of every important detail of your trip by writing a journal. One thing I do when I go on cruises is keep lots of mementos of the trip. Here are some suggestions for things you can scrapbook:
- Any activity or information sheets from the resort or cruise
- Cut outs from brochures
- Tickets, receipts, wristbands
- Postcards
- Newspaper clippings
- Luggage tags or airline tickets
- Dried Flowers, Sand, Shells, Rocks or other physical mementos of the location
- Photos
- Diary entries
Scrapbook these each day, with a journal entry noting down the most memorable and important moments. This will bring back all the memories every time you read it, as well as giving you physical mementos of the trip, all contained in one scrapbook style journal to read through.
I hope that these three tips have helped you think about how to cherish the memories your family makes together on your next holiday, I’d love to hear any suggestions in the comments!
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