Hello creatives! I hope you all have been having a wonderful holiday season. Leah here with you all today showing you more into my December TN before I start transitioning my setup for the new year. If you’d like to see how I decorated the front pockets and the cover of the front notebook, you can check out my last blog post here. I’m excited to show you how I’ve been documenting December and using the Simple Stories free printables to help me keep track of holiday plans and December stories, and to capture more of “me” in my holiday memories. 

I’ve been participating in the December Daily project for a couple of years now. The holiday season can get a little crazy and very busy, so I’m usually not very successful in sitting down to create every day. Sometimes I have a week or longer that go by where I may not have had time to work on my December Daily album. However, I always try to be as consistent as I can about at least jotting down the stories and memories so I don’t forget them before I can work on crafting the layouts. I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the December free printables to help me do this. I’m keeping the printables in a separate notebook behind my December Daily insert.

What I love about the free printables is that you can really use and customize them in any way you wish, but they are also cute and festive enough to use them exactly as they are. Not only are they helping me keep track of all my important lists and information throughout the busy holiday season, they have also helped me plan out some of my December Daily layout ideas and document parts of this season of my life that I want to remember.

I am planning to incorporate some of these planning pages and lists directly into my December Daily because they document so much of what I’m actually doing this time of year. These are great “filler” pages for those days in your album where you don’t feel like you have a particularly “document-worthy” story to tell. In reality, we all have days where we are really busy with work or other “boring” life things and don’t do anything eventful. I like to use some of those days to tell parts of my real, personal day-to-day story. While I absolutely love documenting extra special memories like time spent with family or doing fun holiday activities, an important part of this project is capturing the essence of who you are and where you are in your life during this time, and I feel that my lists and planning are a big part of who I am.

Because I plan to move several of these printables over into my December Daily insert eventually, I purposely chose not to glue them down into the notebook they are in now. I tucked most of these into this notebook and am holding them in lightly with a small piece of clear tape. I also used washi tape or non-permanent/repositionable tape under some pages, but I avoided using anything too sticky that would prevent me from easily moving the pages later.  

I limited myself to using primarily just the printables to keep things simple and functional in this notebook for the sake of time. The goal is to have a notebook to easily jot things down in to plan and track my December.

Because I’ve been giftwrapping, I had a couple of doilies and decorative tissue paper laying around that I was able to layer into the pages for a little added flair, but these printables are really so cute on their own, I would have loved them either way.

Since this contents of this notebook are so simple and functional, I decided to amp things up for the cover. I’ve shared my process before on how to easily create removable covers for TN inserts, which you can check out here on Youtube, but I tried something new for this one and added an interactive shaker element. The glitter “snow” is such a fun detail to compliment the snowy/wintry theme of the Simple Stories Freezin’ Season collection that I used to create and decorate this cover.

This is the first time I’ve created a shaker insert cover so there were a lot of missteps and errors along the way, which I promptly found ways to cover up and conceal. ;) However, this is definitely a process video I’d like to film for YouTube soon. Let me know over on Instagram if that’s something you’d be interested to see.

Here is one example of where I’ve already incorporated the monthly calendar from the free printables into my December Daily. I always like to add a calendar in my album that just captures the “main events” from the holiday season. Since this is not where I keep my day-to-day plans, I can really add lots of décor.

You can see I went a little sticker crazy here… I think my favorite thing on here are the color Christmas bulbs which are a stamp from the Seasons stamp set that I colored in with my Tombow markers. The ugly sweater, holly leaves, and snowman are all stamps from the same set that I added color to as well. You’ll notice I don’t stress myself too much about trying to color in the lines. ;)

Anyway, I’m excited to get to working on more of the pages and layouts in my December Daily notebook. Have you checked out the free printables Simple Stories offers every month? You can check them out here, or via the “Project Downloads” icon on the Simplestories.com home page in the future. Stay tuned here on the blog or over on the Carpe Diem Planners Instagram to see the other fun ways people are using the printables.

Until next time friends, happy holidays!