Have you ever heard of the December Daily album? A page-a-day scrapbook for the month of December that usually exists to document all the wonderful, Normal Rockwell-esque moments lovingly captured during the holiday season.

But how much of that is really real? How much of what we put in scrapbooks, Facebook updates, and family photos is the full story? How true is the picture we paint for others, the picture we try to buy into ourselves?

That’s the sort of question some friends posed a couple months ago, while proposing that we all take a hard look at the hectic days of a real December and scrap that, the good, the bad, and the hilarious. The ring leaders have been offering up prompts for each day, for those who are looking for inspiration, in the Jingle Hells facebook group. I’ve made it through the first week of pages and so far haven’t needed the prompts, but I did want to share what I’d done so far, as a counterpoint to those saccharine-sweet albums that might be showing up on blogs around the web.

No surprise I choose a digital approach to the album, both to keep it easy as well as keep it quick. For continuity’s sake I opted to use a common background from the Brittish Designs/Sahlin Studio Project Mouse (Days): Cards kit. They were intended to be used in a Pocket-Style album for things like counting down to vacation but I thought they were just too perfect for a project like this. In paper scrapbooking it’s a royal pain to have the black, chalkboard-style cards to journal on but digital makes it a snap.

I kept the rest of the elements simple, using mostly fonts to dress up the page, a few choice elements, and the odd Alpha or two. Physically, these pages would only be 6″x4″, so if I get the urge to print them I could put them 6-up on a 12″ sheet, making putting this into an actual album super-simple, or maybe one of the mini albums that every photo printer offers this time of year for cheap. I see now that I switched tense after Day 2, but I’m not going to lose sleep over that. It’s all a part of keeping it real, I guess!

Have you thought about what you’re life looks like in status updates and picture-perfect moments?
How often do you preserve the other side of the story?