Family Calendar 2013

I've been making calendars for my family every Christmas for the past few years, and this year was no exception.  It takes a lot of time and patience, but I am always happy at the completion of my creation.  I've learned a lot about doing them every year, from what people like to see, to getting as efficient as possible with the production.

The first year I made these calendars, I focused around photographs I had taken that year, that I had really enjoyed.  I think my family liked it, but I moved on to use photos of family members throughout the years.  I've also gone from using one traditional photo per month, to including about a dozen shots each month.  I think this is more enjoyable for everyone - especially now that a lot of my siblings are having children.  My sister posted a video on Facebook of her daughter pointing out her aunts and uncles in the family calendar I made last year, which completely melted my heart.

I've contemplated getting these calendars done professionally every year, but I find that it's not a financially smart decision for making twelve calendars.  It's about a hundred dollars cheaper to take the time to create my own calendar (which I simply do in iCalendar on my Mac, where I put in everyone's birthdays, different holidays, and the full moon schedule each year) and print off my own Adobe Illustrator files of photographs.  My only costs are my time, a pack of card stock paper, a couple cartridges of printer ink, and the process of binding at an office supplies store.  I print the calendar on one side of a sheet of card stock, then flip it around and print off the photos.  It takes a lot of time, and patience, but it's worth it to me.  My mom has a binding machine that I've used in the past for my calendars, but this year I decided to knock the whole process out before we went home for the holidays.  My local Staples store was able to bind my calendars within a day, and they even included a clear plastic sheet on the front and a black linen covering on the back.

It seems like every year I make some sort of mistake - this year I discovered after about eight months in that I was printing the calendar part on the top half of the hanging calendar, and the photos on the bottom.  I seem to have an "oh-shit" moment like this every year with my calendars, but I know that I am getting better with the finished product with each shot I take at it.  As they say, you'll be a pro at anything you put ten thousand hours into.  I'm only a couple hundred hours into this family calendar, but I love seeing the progress I make each and every year.  And it's all worth it to see my calendar hung up in my family members' homes whenever I go to visit them.  Not to mention, it makes remembering everyone's birthdays Much easier!