I counted recently. Our last family holiday, eight days on the coast, produced 1,143 photos.
Do you know how many of them my children have seen? Maybe twelve. The ones I posted, the ones I sent to the grandparents, and the blurry one of the seagull stealing a chip, which has been requested at least forty times.
The other 1,131 live in the cloud, which is a lovely poetic name for a place nobody ever visits.
A memory a child can hold beats
a thousand they can scroll past.
{Tweet that.}
When I was small, my mother kept photo albums. Heavy ones, with sticky pages and that crinkly plastic film. On rainy afternoons I would pull them off the shelf and narrate them to anyone who would listen. I knew those photos the way I knew songs. The caravan trip. The cousins’ farm. My father’s regrettable moustache era.
My kids will never pull an album off a shelf unless I put one there. That realisation landed on me somewhere around photo number 1,000, standing in the kitchen, phone in hand, scrolling past a week of our lives at the speed of a slot machine.
So we’ve been experimenting with souvenirs that take up actual space in the actual house. A shell jar from the beach that sits on the windowsill. A drawing my middle one did of the lighthouse, now framed in the hallway like a tiny masterpiece, because it is one.
And this year, a new favourite: we turned our holiday photos into coloring books. Real pages, real paper, our real memories redrawn as outlines. My youngest colored the seagull-and-chip incident with a purple sky and gave the seagull villainous red eyes, which I would argue is photojournalism.
Here’s what surprised me. The coloring books gave the kids a way back in. You can’t color a picture of your own holiday without talking about it. “Remember this pool?” “Was this the day we got lost?” “Why is Dad making that face?” Every page was a conversation, and every conversation was the holiday happening again, in miniature, at the kitchen table.
The 1,143 photos are still in the cloud. But the best twenty of them are downstairs right now, half-colored, dog-eared, and loved. That is more than I can say for any souvenir snow globe we’ve ever bought.
Outline Origins turns your family’s photos into custom coloring books. Upload the images, we create the outlines, and a printed book arrives at your door. A souvenir your kids can actually hold, and make their own.
