Down-sizing. Spring cleaning. Tidying up. Call it what you will, but an onus lurks in every room, on shelves and in cabinets, a big bulky unyielding conundrum, one that cannot be tossed yet to save it seems redundant, obtuse, unsightly.
It’s those fucking scrapbooks.
I, like many people in the early 2000s, succumbed to the scrapbooking craze. In my defense, I had scrapbooked to some degree my whole life. As a child, I collected stickers, organizing and reorganizing them into magnetic photo albums—I still have all three of them. I clipped celebrity photos from Teen Beat and Sassy magazines, of Madonna and Corey Haim and Johnny Depp. A spiral scrapbook of Pillsbury Doughboy full of rubber cemented coupon advertisements sits in my file cabinet. For my high school creative writing class, I made yet another scrapbook, this one of my adventures with my best friend (that one I ripped apart to make better many years later). After I married, I tackled my wedding pictures, my Hawaii honeymoon memorabilia, and all my college ephemera and turned those into scrapbooks with varying degrees of success, not yet falling victim to the materialistic craze of the scrapbooking industry.
That came when my son was born.
As a second child, I felt overlooked and lumped into the memories of my older sister. As an adult, I organized our family photos and discovered my sister’s pictures—just of her—filled up more than one album. Mine barely filled a third of an album since all my pictures were always with her. I overcompensated with my son, taking pictures of all hours of the day (how many photos does any parent need of a sleeping infant?). I had more than enough material for fifty scrapbooks.
I already had photo albums to archive pictures, those heavy fake leather covers that enclose five hundred photos. My meticulous, organized ways meant I never had a picture out of order. With a flip of an album, my son aged in weeks, then months, then years, as the frequency of photo-taking declined through the years. I don’t live online, instead sending in a Shutterfly order every year of the best pictures, placing them into yet another photo album (I’m up to number 11).
The pictures in my scrapbooks are all duplicates, found elsewhere in print. Only my son’s baby scrapbook has much value, for that is a worthy collection of memorabilia, the likes of what a good, old-fashioned scrapbook should be. Hospital documents, shower napkins, and other keepsakes riddle the pages. The story of his complicated birth unfolds beside pictures and artifacts as my writing reveals all the tragedy that occurred when he was born.
The rest of his scrapbooks are ridiculous. I shake my head at my lost time and money. I titled one “Your First Year of Dreams” with you guessed it—all those sleeping baby pictures. Vellum, ribbons, and metal charms adorn the pages. Surprisingly, I found much to write about a sleeping baby, memories that are only significant to a first-time parent, forgotten details that were soon replaced with more prominent toddler memories, although I don’t think my son will ever care that he loved to sleep on the recliner downstairs with a leopard pillow. He knows he was a good little sleeper (still is as far as I can tell now that he’s twenty years old).
The sleepy scrapbook leads into a Your First Year scrapbook with pictures showcasing each month. Lots of layers with stenciled scissors fill each neat page, uncluttered pages with fancy patterned paper backgrounds. With each turn of the page, my writing unveils the key moments of an infant’s life: trips to great-grandparents’ houses, first holidays, and snuggling with the dog. Your Second Year scrapbook is a waste of space, monthly patterned paper without writing, only quotes adorned with stickers and trims. And the A to Z book is even worse, a trend I felt worthy of following, an adjective describing my son for 26 painful pages. His First Christmas book is jammed with panoramic pages, bulky stickers and embellishments, unveiling the over-the-top celebrations at home and with extended family. His birthday book, which covers the first six years, houses all his birthday cards, napkins, flattened balloons, and other trinkets from themed parties, plus a lengthy write up from my point of view. And that’s just on the downstairs bookcase.
Upstairs, in two separate areas, I have a scrapbook about my grandma (which I had given to her and then came back to me after she died) a wedding one and my college one. The one worth the most is of my time in Brooklyn, Iowa, at my grandparents’ houses when I was young. The pages are designed around my writing, consistently laid out throughout the book, with collage posters I ordered from Shutterfly to showcase the pictures. During the pandemic, I consolidated all my childhood school crap into two scrapbooks—those are worthy, but not embellished. They function as a scrapbook should, housing all those silly pieces of paper that for whatever reason I felt the need to save, as if I might turn into a Syliva Plath or an Anne Sexton, that someone will care decades after I’m dead that I was named Most Feminine in fifth grade and participated in the South Dakota Trivia Bowl in sixth grade. Both upstairs and downstairs I have one designated scrapbook filled with random pages, all those meaningful layouts that were meant to be a part of a bigger book but was never made: Halloween, professional family photos, pets.
The amount of space they take up overshadows their nostalgic significance.
I’ve already parted with 99 percent of my scrapbook supplies. Years ago, I filled a tote full of paper and stickers and gave it to my son’s third grade teacher. I sold bulky contraptions that allegedly helped organize all the scrapbooking paraphernalia that one needs to properly scrapbook: the rolling cart with folders large enough for 12×12 paper, paper punches, intricate stencils of puzzle-piece bears and numbers, stacks of die cut letters, panoramic page protectors, fancy ribbons and trim, three dimensional embellishments that mean pages will never lay flat and the finished scrapbook will be that much bulkier. Into the donate pile went those unused fancy scrapbooks, the ones whose covers opened from the middle or the unpractical heart-shaped one, books that never housed even one completed page.
Just a few years ago, I emptied out even more of my supplies, bringing them into my own JDC classroom. When my students stopped wanting to create crafty posters of historical events or design three dimensional concrete poems, I gave away the rest to coworkers. My craft closet has been reduced to few crafty supplies: one small shelf of pattern paper and cardstock, a narrow binder of stickers, and a little divided box for all the nuts and bolts of a crafter, like fabric flowers, gemstones, and holiday doohickeywhatnots. I open the doors just to bask in its neatness, its organized shelves, and especially all the empty white space.
As I’m downsizing, I want to toss some scrapbooks—it’s tempting. If I already have the photos within it and no keepsakes fill the pages and no writing explains the significance, why am I holding on to such books? What purpose do they serve? I tossed some random pages, just to see if I woke up in a sweat of regret the next morning, thinking how could I throw away a page of my life. I felt nothing upon sunrise, except with the goal of decluttering my house even more. A delightful twinkle in my eye was eager to see what I could toss today.
What will happen to these scrapbooks when I’m dead? Siblings might fight over such scrapbooks, but who wants to find room for such large cumbersome items that won’t fit on a normal bookshelf? My son is an only child—I doubt he’ll cherish much of my scrapbooks (if he ever marries, I can imagine his spouse’s disgust of having to store at least two totes of junk). On the bottom shelf of my craft closet sits my grandpa’s scrapbook, one my grandma started, which then turned into his time during World War II. Spiral bound with flimsy black pages, pictures dangle precariously from weak black photo corners, yet that scrapbook is worth more than any book I’ve ever designed—because its purpose wasn’t to flaunt or glitter or display. Its purpose was to document. No patterned paper or trim, no stickers or charms, no fancy die cuts with inspirational quotes, only my grandma’s neat print, years before she went blind from complications from diabetes. No clutter detracts eyes from the memories, from a past that happened long before I existed. Will later generations look at our gawdy scrapbooks of today with such thoughts? Or roll their eyes as they toss them into the garbage?
I find books more valuable than the scrapbooks of today, memoirs that are condensed into a 9 by 11 sized book, that can fit neatly on any shelf, anywhere, yet reveals more than any scrapbook. A scrapbook is much prettier to look at, but it degrades over time as all those embellishments loosen, its bulk warping its pages, its colors fading with age.
Words hold more meaning than pictures and can apply to anyone. We read others’ stories all the time, but we don’t pick up someone’s scrapbook in a thrift store—antique stores are filled with old photographs, but I have yet to see a scrapbook. Only if one becomes famous would we ever care about such a scrapbook. A memoir, one that looks like a real book in a bookstore, has a potential universal value that a scrapbook does not. A memoir might very well be a permanent fixture somewhere in the world. Words will outlast pictures, especially those archived in unsightly, heavy scrapbooks.