My Long Lost Holiday Friend, Olan Mills

My mom took studio Christmas photos almost EVERY YEAR when I was a kid, so she could put them in Christmas cards. Just a hunch... she looooved the tree/fireplace backdrop.

Over the last several months, I've scanned thousands of family photos, including all the studio Christmas portraits I could find. These ones span from 1990 to 2000. My sister Ashley was born in November 1994, so she made an appearance in the photos starting then. :)

I remember wearing the dark green velour/lace dress in that second to last photo for so many occasions around 1997: My cousins' double wedding on the Gateway Clipper, my first Pittsburgh Symphony concert, and this Christmas photo. That gawdy get up has come back to haunt me so many times via old photos.

And it's pretty obvious I was going into my lengthy awkward middle school phase by the last one. I could never figure out how to keep my bangs straight, and swore them off for years. Until I got them again a couple years ago and now can't imagine my forehead and face without them. Haha.

I seriously hated studio portraits as a kid, but having this collection now is kind of nice.

What are some of your favorite Christmas traditions?

Time Capsule: Back to School, 90's style

Sometimes, I'm kind of amazed how much my mom has saved over the years. And as much as I have loathed my parents for being total pack rats, it's treasures like these that make it OK.

* I edited some personal information out of these documents.

I honestly don't remember much about my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gill. However, there is one thing I tell friends and family about what I remember to this day. She's the one who started calling me Katelyn. Prior to that, I went by Katie. Because there was another Katie M. in my class, I would be referred to as Katelyn until the middle of my college years, when I asked people to instead call me by a name I didn't hate.

I'm sure Mrs. Gill didn't mean any harm by inadvertently changing my name for 15 years; she was just trying to lessen confusion in her class. But I remember being 6 years old, sitting in the backseat of my mom's car as she was driving, being told my name wasn't actually Katie. I couldn't stop crying.

But that's what I went by for years and years, mostly out of habit, familiarity.

Anyway, that's what struck out to me in these photos and papers most. "Katelyn" was everywhere. But even on my coloring book page, I signed it off "Katie".

Then in college, I told an internship supervisor about how much I loathed my name, and about my first grade teacher changing it.

"Then why not go by something else?" she told me.

I've been going by Kate ever since.

I think that I learned an important life lesson there. If there's something in your life you don't like, change it. Complaining is OK sometimes, but how far will that really get you? Of course, not everything is as easy as changing a name. But life is too short to tolerate things you don't like, especially if it's something you deal with on a daily basis. Seriously. I think I need to remind myself of that sometimes.

The name Kate just feels more like me, as weird as that sounds. It feels more informal, more personable somehow.

Anyway, it's hard to believe that all of these mementos are from 20 years ago. I was struck by the pristine condition my mom kept all of these old papers in, without wrinkles or fading. And that she shot photos of me drawing a coloring book page that she ended up keeping of of these years.

Now that education and K-12 schools are kind of tangent to what I do at my job, it was really cool to come across these photos from yesteryear, even with the silly memories. What are some of your favorite back to school memories?

Time Travel Tuesday: Foxy Grandma

There are so many beautiful things about the first photo of my grandma with two of my uncles.

First is that darling swimsuit she's wearing. I absolutely love it. It's cool to know she wore the high-waist swimsuit style that's gotten really trendy again over the past few summers.

There's also my Uncle Rege, on the left, who's picking his nose. Classic.

But I think what I love most about this is that this is a new side of my grandma I never saw, as a young mother, probably not much older than me.

She died when I was 14, so while I knew her well from a grandma-type perspective, I never got to look through these photos and ask her about them when I was going through shoe boxes of old photos at my parents' house a few years ago. I only knew her with white hair, a perm, who was almost always sipping on a cup of coffee when I saw her. I know she hated being photographed when she was older, so she might have been the same way here, trying to look away from the camera. Or maybe she saw something in the distance. Who knows. I'm not even sure where they were, but my mom said her family went to New England beaches a lot as kids.

From the how old my uncles look here, I'm guessing this was taken in the mid-1950s, perhaps even before my mom was born. (My mom is four years younger than my uncle on the left and two years younger than my uncle on the right.)

I started digitally archiving family photos a couple years ago, but never got around to putting the scanned photos into albums to distribute. Someday soon, I hope. I even considered doing interviews with family members to bring a more detailed narrative to the photos, but that, of course, would take a lot of time and effort.

I just love that this moment was captured because the expressions in it are so candid. The second photo is cute too, but I mostly put that in because my grandma's face can be seen in it. I hope these are photos that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Do you have any photos like this of older and/or deceased family members when they were younger?

Time Travel Tuesday: Camping with Dad

In the name of Father's Day this weekend, I will let this photo of me, hideous fleece sweater and all, be unveiled onto the Interwebs.

My family went pop-up trailer camping a lot growing up. I think my dad thrived on preparing for the ultimate mini-adventure. We never went anywhere too exciting: Lake Erie, Virginia Beach, (and Disney World, once) but it was nice to always have a familiar place to sleep when traveling.

I was probably 10 or 11 years old here, since my sister Ashley looks about four. I love that she's holding a burnt-to-a-crisp marshmallow on a stick, with her deceivingly cute grin.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to find a good photo of my entire family. Looking back, it seems like my mom was always holding the camera. If not her, it was my dad taking photos.

Anyway, as many old family photos as I've pored through, there are few good photos I've found of us camping, even though it felt like we were camping constantly then.

While my dad and I aren't the particularly close, this is how I think of him at his best: Readying camp, building fires, doing goofy stuff. He installed a singing "La Cucaracha" horn in the van we used to pull the pop-up trailer. Once in awhile the horn got stuck. It lead to some amusing situations with people screaming at us in the middle of the night. I realize now that all those things he did while we were camping were ways of showing he loved us.

Do you have any favorite childhood memories with your dad?