Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

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For much of her life, each December my daughter has set out Christmas Eve food for Santa and his reindeer. For years, I took a photograph of her careful plate of treats. I’m guessing many of you have a similar series of holiday-related images -- your lineage of holiday trees, or the succession of family dinners that begins with Thanksgiving. 

Here’s several ideas for making your favorite photographic images into a vital part of your holiday traditions.

First, get them out of the drawer, or box, or photo album where you store them. For prints or negatives, get them reprinted at a good photography store so you don’t cut or mark up your originals. If they're digital files, saved to a computer hard drive, your iPhone, or trapped inside your camera on the memory card, back them up to an external dive like a flash drive and get prints made. The same is true with photographs stored in your FaceBook or Instagram accounts. Get prints and get ready to have some fun.

For holiday meals, use photographs as place cards at the dinner table. For a family dinner, pick a baby photo of each person and see if everyone can figure out the baby’s identity. Or, use shots from family adventures. Then listen as people begin to share stories, “Oh, yeah, remember that snowshoe trek in Yellowstone? We had so much fun...”.

Take the images you didn’t use for place cards and put them in a basket for visitors to sort through. Or, work together to create a collage. Set out poster board, photo stickers, and colored markers, along with festive stickers to use as decorative enhancements. Embellish the collage with cutouts from old holiday cards. For a more formal look, most stores that sell pre-made frames offer collage frames. Others offer a service where you take in your digital images, design the layout you want, and they create the collage for you.

As you rev up for a frenzy of holiday decorating, create photo-garlands by attaching prints to a brightly colored ribbon. Use two photo sticker squares to attach photographs back to back, so that the garland looks good no matter which angle you see it from. Run ribbon between the photos, through the opening between the stickers. Organize images by theme or color. Hang the garland across a room or along a mantle. Use a garland, or two, or three, to decorate this year's holiday tree.

Create a custom album or photo book filled with images from holiday celebrations or use one to showcase your favorite images of winter's snowy beauty. It’s simpler than you think: much can be designed and ordered online and you can use photos taken with your iPhone. Send the finished product to long-distant friends of relatives, as a kind of virtual hug. If you'll be traveling, pack it along to show and share.

If you’re thinking, "Well, maybe next year," then what you can do now is get your camera off the shelf to use at holiday celebrations, gatherings and adventures. If you’ll give a camera as a gift, include everything you need for the recipient to unwrap that camera and immediately begin to use it.

Then, on those long, cold and snowy, January nights, explore the shots you took. Choose some to create truly personal cards to send thanks for holiday gifts and gatherings or express your best wishes for the New Year.

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