On the anniversary of our engagement, we go back to the scene of the crime for champagne, and make someone take a dorky picture. The place where we got engaged just closed! So we’re going to have to figure out what to do for engagement anniversary number six. . .
x,
Paula
http://www.adhocmom.com

Now I’m sad…. I realized I don’t collect anything! Oh… maybe travel journals, I write in a little notebook on every vacation, camping trip, etc. and save those for memories :)

LOOOOVE the chopstick idea, very unique!

Love the Chopstick idea! I do something similar with wine corks! I take a wine cork, date it, and have my guests sign it so that I have a record of when the bottle was shared, with whom, and the day. It’s fun! And decorative, too!

Lindsay

On our honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas, my husband and I each got tattoos:)I got one of the famous rock arch (El Arco) on my foot and my husband (being a saltwater fish lover) got one of a King Angel on his back. Everytime I look at it, it reminds me of all the great adventures we went on in Mexico<3

We go overboard on photography. Our kids love looking at photos, it is a great reminder of things we’ve done together. I don’t want a ton of photos hanging on my walls though, I like them in albums.

ps. I love those hanging photo frames you had in Sarah’s mood board. Delish.

We do ornaments. Then as we put up our tree every year we can reminisce about the places we’ve been. Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, Biloxie, MS for his Air Force Training, the past bases we’ve been at, a shell one from our honeymoon, when we went to visit the arch in St. Louis. We never have a ‘themed’ tree (like your beautiful citrus one this year), it’s more a hodgepodge of memories!

I’m an artist, so everything is potential art to me. We collect wine corks and send postcards to ourselves,too. I keep every bottlecap I find, ’cause I’m gonna make something when I get enough of them. ;-) I also keep fortunes from fortune cookies, and display them in a dish on the coffee table…. guests like picking them up to read them, before I use them for art or jewelry. I love your photo strip idea, and your chopsticks, too.

One other thing we like to “collect” are photos taken on an observation tower at a local vineyard here in Arkansas. It was one of the prettiest photos we have ever had taken of us as a couple…. and now, we take pictures of other couples we know in the same spot.

We’ve been collecting wine corks since almost our first date – we saved some from our special family dinners, our engagement, wedding and honeymoon, special trips we have taken and Sunday night at home eating pizza :-) We have a tall vase in the kitchen that we drop them in and there are over 400 of them now!!!

About two years before The Boy and I married, we (or it may have been just me) suffered from a bout of hysteria and decided it would be ‘fun’ to have 9 of our closest relatives over for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Now this might actually have been fun if the insanity hadn’t set it. I think now that I wanted desperately to seem like a ‘real’ grownup, and two things crystallized in my mind as to how I could do that.

The first was the apartment. It had to be spotless. We cleaned for a week. We bought furniture. We used touch-up paint. We hired maids to come scrub the baseboards and windows. Now it was all clean, but the apartment building was old and ill maintained. No amount of scrubbing in this world will make up for 80 years of poor treatment. You cannot scrub a crack out of a window nor a dent out of a floor nor are you going to successfully polish the 18 coats of paint on a rusty radiator to a glossy shine. You can have very very clean baseboards, but the lumps of dust they painted over 10 years ago are still going to be lumps. I realize this now (I have a 90 year old house, it was realize this or go insane), but it was a challenging concept at first.

The second was the food. We made a feast. The kind with 3 types of stuffing and 4 pies and a dozen side dishes and a bird the size of a small asteroid. But the apartment thwarted us here too. The kitchen was tiny. Imagine a strip of floor 2 feet wide and 5 feet long with cabinets and appliances on the long sides, and a window and doorway on the short sides. You could stand in the middle, reach out your arms, and touch either pair of walls without moving your feet. The refrigerator only opened partway because the door bumped into the stove. Most of the food lived in a cabinet in the hallway because there was no pantry, and most of the dishes lived in a cabinet in the dining room because there were almost no cabinets. Of course, there was no dishwasher.

Now we did it, and we survived. We fed everyone tasty food, off of good china, at one table, in a spotless apartment. There were decorations and music and wine and a good time was had by all. But after everyone went home, as we surveyed the wreckage and mentally totted up the time and money we’d spent putting it together, we turned to each other and said, “next year we’re getting pizza.” Thus the tradition was born.

We’ve gotten pizza on Thanksgiving every year since (this year was the sixth). We’ve made our own, we’ve had it delivered, we’ve driven out in a blinding snowstorm to fetch it. Sometimes we’ve been out of the country and had the fun of tracking down something resembling pizza wherever we were. It’s a tradition, we must follow it.

I am thrilled with the vacation jar idea! We have boxes of mementos from our trips, and scatterings of photos. Even though I am otherwise a DIY and craft enthused person scrap booking just offends some part of me. Best solution ever!

thank you so much for posting those ideas, my husband and i travel a lot and love the idea of the map and the vacation jars!! i have collected sand from some of the beaches we have been to and want to make a display of those. good thing you mentioned the cooked sushi, people would have been all over you like white on rice! happy new year!

We collect squished pennies and things that we can use to decorate our Christmas tree on vacations.

While studying abroad in college, I began collecting shotglasses… at the time, I thought “they’re everywhere, they’re cheap & they can be stuffed in a tiny backpack”. Now a decade after the collection began, I’m wondering… what does a grownup in a grownup house do with a big box of shotglasses??

I’m an avid photographer. Many of my friends have reprints of my photos framed and hanging on their walls. Me? Well, it’s on my To Do List – for a couple of years now…

LOVE the vacation jar idea! i collect sand and have multiple bottles but we also send ourselves postcards so what a great way of combining the two in a single container! Thanks and happy new year!

I love all the ideas in this post! So wonderful, I will have to start my own.

I had been carrying around a champagne cork from the day we got engaged for too long. I decided to make it into a Christmas ornament and start the tradition.

Here’s my post about it:
http://istealgoodideas.com/julia-original/commemorate-with-a-cork/

Keep the good ideas coming!

Got any ideas for what to do with about five years worth of miscellaneous ticket stubs?? :)

I am not sure how or why this started but if ever my husband and I go out for lunch at a cafe my husband has to take (steal?) a sugar sachet. After quite a few years of doing this we have a glass bowl full of them!

While walking along a beach one time, my beloved picked a stone from a rock pool and gave it to me. Since then if we go for a walk somewhere lovely he will often give me a rock. We’re currently living in the UK but will eventually return to NZ. I will literally be sending some rocks home to NZ. I can’t wait to eventually get all my UK rocks gathered together with my NZ rocks once we’re back.