Twelve Months of Moments
For the last 6 years or so, I have created a photo calendar to give as a holiday gift to friends and family. This tradition started out fairly small, with 10 copies of a wall calendar featuring family photos and marking family birthdays and anniversaries. They were a hit, so I kept making them, but I moved more toward theme-based calendars. One year the theme was “Look Up!” and featured photos looking upward at objects; another year it was “Road Tripping,” with photos from my travels.
Because people seemed to really like the calendars, and because I enjoy making people happy, each year I expanded the “to” list, including colleagues at work, extended-family members, church friends, and more. I now order a pretty ridiculous number of them each year (thank you, Snapfish, for the 70-percent-off sales on Cyber Monday!) and yet I still have to make some tough decisions on whom to gift.
That’s one reason I’ve decided to post the calendar content online, as a collection within my “Midnight Musings” foray into writing: to be able to share the pictures and their stories with more people. As egotistical as that might sound, it’s really not about showcasing my work, which is amateur at best. It’s more about connecting with others, sharing the little joys of life with people who are IN my life.
I also am posting the calendar because this year’s theme, “In the Moment,” is not just about the photographs. Each one captures a particular moment or moments that I experienced; most occurred in 2014, and many of them were moments I experienced alone. So even though others might look at these photos and say, “That’s a neat photograph,” what I really want to share is the stories behind the moments that are captured by the photographs.
Because isn’t that a big part of the human experience? Sharing our stories? Many of them have been passed down through the ages as great works of literature, or religious doctrine, or historical records of seminal events that shaped our world, our principles, our cultures. And yet, as important as those stories are, they represent no more than a single drop in an endless sea of human experiences relived through storytelling—most of which occurs on an intimate level within our personal “circles” and focuses on events that never make the headlines but are nonetheless important to us.
Our stories connect us. They define us. They set us apart from all other species. They allow us to relive important moments in our lives, over and over again. We re-experience the laughter, the happiness, the surprise, and sometimes the grief or sadness or anger, of moments in our timelines when we share them with others through storytelling, be it through words, pictures, music, or combinations of the same.
Capturing moments, connecting with others, sharing life’s experiences; these are some of the reasons I was drawn to journalism as a career, writing as a passion, and photography as a hobby.
And so, I offer my 2015 calender of photos, captions, and stories to anyone who wishes to share in the moments depicted therein. None of those moments will change the world, but they changed me—at least for a little bit, and at least for an instant.
My next post will give the stories behind the calendar’s theme and cover photo, which is also the banner photo for this post. Check back near the beginning of each month for the story behind that month’s photograph.
