I would love to help you combine your photos and your stories into a book for your family. Start now and you will have the most loved gift next year for the holidays. Or how about creating it for Mother's Day or Father's Day. Just take the time to begin. You do not need to have photos that go with the stories you tell.
The best way I have found is to get a special journal or notebook and everytime you think of something jot it down. You can go back later to add more details but at least get the idea written down. Or you can write down questions you want to ask a loved one when you next talk.
Ms. Kalkow wrote a wonderful editorial recently in the Kennebec Journal. With her permission I am sharing it here with you. I hope this inspires you to write some of your own family stories. Let me know how I can help you.
Sharing Family stories the best present you can give your relatives
by Theodora J. Kalikow
One of the traditional foods for our family celebration of Hanukkah was potato latkes, or pancakes.It was my brother Dan's job to grate the potatoes. He hated it. Every single year, he would manage to grate his own knuckles, then bleed and howl dramatically, in hopes that my mother would sympathize and take the grater away from him.
She never did. She would just pass the Band-Aids and hand over more peeled potatoes.
One year, my dad the engineer invented a kitchen appliance that had various attachments, something like the food processors of today. When he brought home the prototype, he swore it would make grating potatoes a quick and easy job.
Dan grabbed it, and they rushed to do a test run. The potatoes went in -- unwashed and unpeeled. Brown goo came out! Horror and amazement! Cook that stuff? Over my mother's dead body! Who let those engineers into her kitchen? Grating went on as usual that year.
And here's another Hanukkah story. My dad liked to make home movies of us kids. One year, he filmed us lighting the Hanukkah candles. You start with one candle the first night of the holiday, and the second night you light two, and so on until you reach the eighth and final night when, of course, you have eight. You light them with another candle.
On this particular year, I'm maybe 7 or 8 years old. It's the last night of the holiday. All the candles are ready in the menorah. The camera is rolling. I'm holding the burning candle to light the others with, and we're singing the blessing.
Dad is fussing with the exposure and the focus, and I'm not supposed to finish lighting them all yet. I'm holding the candle, I'm holding the candle, and that candle is burning down, down, down. Dad is urging me to smile, my brother is fidgeting, and then my fingers get burned. I drop the candle and my singing turns to crying. Talk about howling dramatically! Somewhere in film heaven this scene is preserved, even unto this day.
So why am I telling you this? Here's why: I am the only person left in my family who knows these stories. After me, nobody might know them. And you, dear reader, are in the same situation, or you will be soon. So at this season for giving presents, give the gift of your stories.
It doesn't matter how you do it. You can start a routine of writing down a little memory every day. It does not have to be pretty, or spelled right.
You can write it in a notebook or type it on a computer or a typewriter. You can put it on little scraps of paper. You can write letters to a relative.
You can make a scrapbook or take a pile of pictures in a shoebox (I know you have them) and write short descriptions and memories that the pictures and things make you think of. You can record your memories by telling them to someone if you don't want to write.
You can put them on YouTube or in a blog.
I can promise you, if you start, more memories will surface and you will have plenty to keep you busy. Your childhood? Your family? Your jobs? Your school? Your hobbies? Your pets? Just start someplace.
A few years before my dad died, my brother and I badgered him into doing just this. At 88 or so, Dad looked upon it as his new job. Every morning, he would sit down at his computer-hooked-up-to-the-TV and write maybe 500 words about his parents and siblings, his education, his jobs or our life as a family. Then he would email them to family members.
After he had done it for a few days, he looked forward to these sessions. We all loved to read the results and cheered him on.
My brother put them all into a little book for each of us to have.
Your stories will be the best present you could ever give your family members. And these days, it's easy to share your memories around the world and into the future.
Books, stories, poems, pictures and letters have always carried on this human conversation. It is one of the glories of humanity. Now we have more ways for many more of us to join in.
My wish for the holidays is that you all resolve to do it.
Reprinted in full with permission from Theodora J. Kalikow
From the Kennebec Journal December 4, 2011
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