by Teddy Ward

Created on: December 10, 2009

Having two young boys at home and recently recovering from divorce I have had to come up with affordable ways for them to create unique and memorable Christmas presents that were not going to cost me a lot of money.  I wouldn’t consider myself overly creative minded but I have in the last year found that when no other options exist my imagination has awoken from a very deep slumber.  I am not saying that these ideas of mine are original or unique and I don’t believe I have invented anything new. Rather I have learned the importance of keeping my minds eye open to all the ideas that are already out there and finding ways to recreate them at home so that my kids and I can have activities to do together with an end result that we can use as gifts for others.  

One of my favorite projects so far and one my boys have had the most fun working on has been letting them create Christmas Albums to give to family and friends as gifts during Christmas or other special occasions.  The first and most important step in this process for us is to get the boys a camera. I had an older digital camera from years back that I pulled out of a box and cleaned up for the boys to use. I taught them how to use the new camera and told them to go take pictures of each other and of their favorite favorite toys, their rooms, outside, and whatever else they thought would be fun to take pictures of over the next week or two.  When doing a project of this nature it is amazing the photos that the kids bring back on their cameras. The important thing to remember is that you have to  sit back and just let them take pictures of whatever it is they want so that the photos are completely unique and created by them.

The next step is to download the pictures on a computer or if you don’t have a computer to have them developed.  There are various locations that you can bring a digital camera or a digital cameras memory card to where they have computers you can use right in the store to delete the unusable photos and sometimes even enhance and photo shop the pictures you like before having them developed.  If you are fortunate enough to have your own computer at home and the Internet, you can download any number of photo programs that help a person photo shop pictures right from your home computer.  If the kids are doing this project alone it is important to find a program for the compute that is simple and easy for them to use.The next

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