I usually post on this blog ideas for scrapbooking about yourself. Since my third book, The Book of Us, is about scrapbooking about your relationships, I thought I’d share some thoughts on that topic. That, and it’s my anniversary today, so marriage is on my mind.
Eighteen years ago today, at the tail end of a rather impressive ice storm, I married my husband , for richer or poorer, for better or for worse. We haven’t seen too much of the “richer”, but have definitely enjoyed far more “better” than “worse”. We both took the day off to celebrate, and just spend the day together. We decided to just put together our own marathon of movies that we’ve seen throughout the course of our courtship & marriage. We figured we would be able to find pretty much anything we’d want, either in our own DVD collection, or via Netflix on demand. We don’t currently have a TV in our bedroom, so my husband suggested we temporarily move the TV and Blu-Ray into our room, so we could lay in bed all day and watch movies.
I spent an afternoon on IMDB (Internet Movie Database), looking up movies from the late 80s & early 90s, when we were dating and during our early married years. I came up with a list of about 17 movies – fortunately, I have the ability to bend time and space, so I knew we would have no problem fitting all of those movies into a one-day movie marathon. (Do you ever have that problem? Wanting/expecting to get WAY more done in a specific time window than is humanly possible? I do – all the time.)
Here’s the list I came up with:
- Beauty and the Beast
- Princess Bride
- Father of the Bride
- French Kiss
- 100 Girls
- Pretty Woman
- Flatliners
- Matrix(s)
- Mystery Men
- Honeymoon in Vegas
- Henry V
- X-Files
- Farscape pilot
- Moonlighting
- Usual Suspects
- 6th Sense
- Titanic
- Incredibles
- X-men
- Jerry Maguire
- As Good as it Gets
- American Pie
- Serenity
We wound up watching only two movies (Beauty & the Beast, and Pretty Woman), so it wasn’t really much of a “marathon”, but it was still fabulous quality time. The movies brought back a lot of memories of when our relationship was young. As a bonus, I pulled out a DVD of home movies shot during our first year of marriage – we were so YOUNG (I was 22, he was 23). Our kids were still home on winter break, so we called them in to watch the footage, and we all had a great time laughing about our youth.
My point in sharing our anniversary celebration with you is to encourage you to do something similar – even if it isn’t your anniversary, give some thought to activities you have done during the course of your relationship, and how you could host your own sort of “marathon”. It could be movies, or music, places you’ve lived, or a fashion review. It doesn’t really matter – what matters is the time you spend honoring your years together, all that you’ve come through, and activities that have contributed to a common bond between you. As in my case, you could brainstorm a list of suggestions, then decide together what “makes the cut”.
Then once you host your version of that “marathon”, scrap a layout about it. Journal about how you decided what to include, why those things are meaningful to your relationship, and what you did on “Marathon Day”. By scrapping the page, it’s like you get the enjoy the memories all over again.
I’d love to hear if anyone gives this exercise a try – please feel free to leave a comment below.
