The holiday season can feel like a marathon of trying to ensure you have a gift for everyone, the perfect decorations, and the food your loved ones expect. However, gathering together to celebrate and carry on cherished traditions, or make new ones, connects us to those we love most and makes all of the hustle and bustle worthwhile. To make your holidays that much sweeter, invite your loved ones to help you capture and preserve special traditions by using shared folders in your Permanent.org archive.
Each Christmas, I’m tasked with making my Grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie bars. In years past, this meant I had to call up my relatives and ask around for a copy of the recipe. This year I scanned and stored all of my Grandmother’s recipes onto Permanent so that when the holiday season rolled around, I didn’t have to go searching. I also thought ahead and shared the recipes with my extended family via Permanent so everyone had access to their favorites! This is my way of helping my family stay connected to my grandmother and carry on traditions she started.
Holiday gatherings are the perfect time to expand the traditions you already have to include capturing and collecting memories you want to preserve in the moment. With our new Share to Permanent feature, you can easily upload your photos or videos from your phone to an archive, preserving your traditions for the next year and the next generation. When you upload to Permanent, you’ll be able to look back, year after year, on your shared memories and the people or traditions that made them so special.
Your gathering is also the perfect opportunity to recruit others to help you with this task! When you give guests small, but fun, tasks it can really increase their sense of purpose and make festivities more meaningful or memorable. For example, my uncle is an amazing photographer who is always hiding behind a camera at family events, so I plan to give him the task of capturing and uploading photos and videos to Permanent. I believe he will love playing this key role at our annual Christmas party. Who can you recruit to help you?
I’ve already created a shared folder for recipes in preparation for the holidays, where my family can view what I’ve uploaded. For the gathering, I’ll create a shared “Christmas Party” folder and invite others to upload photos and videos from our time together. Once they have a link, they’ll be able to create an account and download the Permanent app for their device. From there, they’ll have the option to upload directly, write captions, and share their favorite moments from the gathering. Having multiple people upload their media also means always having access to the very best version of it. When a photo or video is sent through text, social media, or email it is often compressed and loses quality, which is unfortunate. Permanent preserves the quality and integrity of digital files so they can be enjoyed later.
Beyond knowing my traditions are safe on Permanent for years to come, it also gives me great joy to look back on the memories I cherish most. It is rewarding to see how my family traditions connect through time. Here are three photos I found in my archives that depict something as simple as decorating our tree. Despite the gaps in time, reflecting on these photos made me realize just how special it can be to look back on old memories and observe the ways our traditions have carried forward.
