#18 Inspired by seasonal details

As ever, I could have gone on in a million different directions with this week's prompt and even repeated some of the topics I've already made layouts about. After all, there is always a second or a third twist to the stories. And then some years I'm a bit of a Christmas fiend with all the decorations and many of them have their own stories which also need recording. I have all the photos for them after all.

But I decided to keep it simple and the one detail that kept coming into my head.

Silly paper hats.

Yes, I know that seems a little odd and I don't know if you all have Christmas crackers but in the UK and in my family, they are quite traditional. When I came to Germany I was surprised that they didn't have them and only have standard crackers for New Year's Eve. But the British ones are so much better. The crappier the better in fact! The really cheap and uncool ones are the most fun as they have the most corny jokes, the best stupid toys and of course, nicely bright, too thin, paper hats! So I started bringing them over so that we could have them with our English style Christmas dinner that I cook for my German family. They were very unsure to begin with and I had to a bit of cajoling to get them to actually wear those silly hats for the camera. But now we all love this little bit of silliness in an otherwise quite formal dinner and I try to always get photos of us all wearing our trademark hats.

I thought about using photos of the whole family before realising that I actually had three different dinners last Christmas with different crackers, hats and photos. And the layout was born! I love the contrast between the elegance of the dinner table, the smart party clothes and the childish headwear!

I used some elements from a kit I had last December. In contrast to Pam, I am a Christmas product freak and get a lot of stuff but I don't make that many layouts ;-) I use it to make cards but the drive to create 12x12s is not so strong. I wanted to make a daily December mini-album of some sort from 13th December through to 6th January which uses up quite a lot of product but so far, this is far from reality. So it was nice to use up a few bits and pieces from my Christmas drawer.

I always think that if I tell my story of Christmas details in my own way just one layout at a time like this one here, then the picture will be fuller and more rounded as time goes on. This type of layout makes me happy and I don't feel the pressure to make those formal pages.

ETA: You can see the layout I made on one little Christmas detail over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge site (here) or on my blog (here), which inspired this week's challenge.

What detail did you capture this week?  Don't forget to share over at Flickr using the tag WM#18.

I'm sure Pam's challenge tomorrow will be a good one and then it's almost count down by hours to the big day!

Happy Sunday everyone and wishing you a great start to the week!