If you're looking for a special holiday project that makes a great handmade gift, consider learning how to make a family Christmas recipe book. A recipe scrapbook is a wonderful way to make sure the knowledge of how to prepare your favorite dishes is saved for future generations.
Food, Fun, and Fond Memories
Most families have a number of food-related rituals they associate with the holiday season. For example:
- Sipping hot cocoa by the fireplace
- Baking Christmas cookies to give to the neighbors
- Leaving treats for Santa
- Enjoying a special Christmas Eve meal
A Christmas recipe book provides a creative way to preserve the recipes that are a vital part of your family traditions.
Collecting the Recipes
The first step in making a family Christmas recipe book is to collect your favorite holiday recipes. Look through your personal cookbooks or request special recipes from your family's best chefs. You may also want to ask your family members what foods they associate with the Christmas holiday, since not everyone will enjoy the same dishes.
When typing recipes to include in your scrapbook, don't forget to proofread your work carefully! Accidentally typing "1 teaspoon" instead of "1 tablespoon" or substituting "baking powder" for "baking soda" in a recipe is sure to diminish the value of your project as a tool for preserving family food traditions.
Aside from your favorite recipes, this type of scrapbook also provides a great way to preserve stories such as how a particular dish came to be a family favorite or the funny cooking mishaps that have occurred over the years. Feel free to be creative with this aspect of your scrapbook journaling, since this is what will distinguish your project from an ordinary cookbook.
Adding Photos
Obviously, photos are an important part of any recipe book. When people want to try out a new recipe, their first concern is what the dish is going to look like when it's finished. Try to include as many clear photos of the featured recipes as possible. For tips on how to photograph food up close, consider reviewing the LoveToKnow Photography article on How to Take Digital Macro Photos.
If you want to add more photos to your Christmas recipe book, here are a few other options to consider:
- People preparing the food
- Family members enjoying a meal together
- Photos relating to the person who created the recipe or a funny anecdote about that particular dish
Tips for How to Make a Family Christmas Recipe Book
Additional tips for how to make a family Christmas recipe book include:
- Keep the design of your pages fairly simple. When deciding how to make a family Christmas recipe book, remember that this is a very practical sort of scrapbook. You want the recipes to take center stage. Scrapbook Sketches: Interview with PageMaps Creator Becky Fleck discusses how to use sketches to make your scrapbooking quicker and more efficient, but this is also a great approach to try when making a recipe scrapbook.
- When choosing your fonts, stick to typefaces that are fairly large and easy to read. The goal is to make the recipe book a valuable resource for the cook in the kitchen.
- Consider having your pages laminated at a copy shop for extra durability. This will also be helpful in the kitchen, so accidental spills or greasy fingerprints don't ruin your hard work.
- Even if you're not normally a digital scrapbooker, making digital pages is a great way to create a family Christmas recipe book. This is the type of scrapbook that loved ones are guaranteed to request additional copies of. If all the files are stored on your computer, it will be easy to make extra books as needed. The LoveToKnow Scrapbooking article Digital Scrapbook Free Christmas Backgrounds lists a variety of resources you can use to start creating your recipe scrapbook.
