Advent Calendar - December 5: Outdoor Decorations

This post is part of a series for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. See all my posts in this series.

My family was never real big on outdoor decorations. When I was a kid we had coloured lights around the edge of the roof, but the switch for them was kind of finicky, and eventually my parents just stopped putting them up. The one thing my mom still puts outside is the garland and ribbons on the railings of the front steps, and a wreath on the door.

That minimal outdoor decorating was pretty standard in my neighbourhood, but there are a few households known for going all out. There's one house a few blocks away from the house I grew up in that looks positively ridiculous for months around Christmas. They have a huge manger scene, reindeer and Santa's sleigh on the roof, more lights than you can comfortably look at, and lately some of those inflatable rotating snowmen that I find less than charming. Lots of people stop their cars in front of that house to take pictures of it every year.

Now I live in an apartment, so outdoor decorations are a bit more tricky (I don't think I even have a plug on my balcony). We do have these pretty little white lights hanging in the living room window, though, and our tree is in front of the window too, so if people were looking up to the sixth floor from the park that my windows look out on, I imagine it would look pretty. :)

Advent Calendar - December 4: Christmas Cards

This post is part of a series for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. See all my posts in this series.

My family's never been really big on sending cards, but we do exchange cards with a few cousins that have moved out of town, since we don't see them at the family Christmas party anymore. Cards that my parents received are propped up on the piano for the rest of the season for people to look at.

I would like to start sending more cards as a small way of showing people I don't keep in touch with very well that I am thinking of them. Even though I like the benefits of e-cards both economically and environmentally, I find they don't quite make the same statement that "I've been thinking of you even though we don't talk enough, so I went to the effort to mail you this card". E-cards are perfect for friends you see all the time, though. So there's my two-cents on that!

Now that I've started getting in touch with more distant cousins that don't live in Winnipeg, I look forward to sending more cards each year. I love the way genealogy can bring people together who live so far apart!

Advent Calendar - December 3: Christmas Tree Ornaments

This post is part of a series for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. See all my posts in this series.

Most of the ornaments on our tree when I was growing up were crafts. My sister and I were both Girl Guides, and we also bought crafts from other Girl Guides at a giant annual craft sale called the Caddy Lake Tea.

My mom does have a set of heirloom ornaments that she often doesn't even hang on the tree, for fear of a child knocking them off and breaking them. They're great big coloured balls, and they belonged to my great grandmother.

Nowadays my ornaments are changing a bit. We still have lots of snowmen and reindeer and whatnot in celebration of the secular Christmas that Jonathon and I both celebrate, but added to that are pentagrams made of pipe cleaners, and symbols of the Sun (because Yule celebrates the rebirth of the Sun). Although, many of our decorations have actually stayed the same, since so many common symbols used at Christmas are Pagan in origin, so they're the same ones used at Yule, including the evergreen tree.

December To Dos

I can't believe I forgot to write my December goals! This Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories stuff must be throwing me off by keeping me so busy. December's always a really busy month, so I'll keep my goals nice and modest:

• Figure out what's going on with Jonas Aspinall's tree, and get my information all cleaned up with all false connections gone.
• Go to the library at least once to work on my huge pile of record lookups.
• Put in several hours of scanning time.
• Go shopping for acid- and lignin-free photo albums for my grandma's photos.

Nothing too ambitious here, so I'm hopeful that I'll complete my goals this month. What do you hope to accomplish this December?

Advent Calendar - December 2: Holiday Foods

This post is part of a series for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. See all my posts in this series.

My family has Christmas dinner every year, with just the immediate family. It's basically your typical turkey dinner. Since I went vegetarian a few years ago, it's become slightly more complicated, in that there are two stuffings (one that was actually stuffed in a bird, one that wasn't), two gravies (one that involves meat drippings and one that doesn't), and stuffed acorn squash.

My extended family on my dad's side also gets together on the Saturday before Christmas. It used to be Christmas Eve, but people were so busy we decided to move it earlier. On that night I see all my aunts and uncles and cousins, many of whom I don't see the rest of the year. Most of the meal consists of hors d'oeuvres that are soooo yummy.

And that's not even getting into the cookies... those are for another day!

It's Data Backup Day!

The first of every month is Data Backup Day. So let's talk about backing up our genealogy data! I haven't been real good about this, to be honest. It was only a few months ago that I got back into genealogy, after years of university taking up all my time. When I started in high school, it was pretty much hand drawn family trees for me, along with piles of unorganised notes, and at some point I entered my info on a couple of online family tree sites (though I don't think I ever got everything up on any one site).

Now, I do most of my work on WikiTree, finding information online and putting it straight into my profiles. I hardly use paper at all, except for taking notes at the library. Unfortunately, this has resulted in me having most of my data either only on a website, or only on my computer, which is not a good state of affairs.

So, here are the things that I should be doing on a regular basis to make sure my data is all good and secure:

• Back up my blog. This is an easy one, at least on Blogger. If you don't know how to export your blog, google it, with the name of your blogging platform. Lots of people have written about it. I think I'll start doing this once a month.
• Back up my family tree. This one is huge. If all my online data disappeared tomorrow, I would lose pretty much everything. It would take me months to get back to where I am now. Luckily, most places that let you keep your family tree online (WikiTree, etc.) have an easy way to export your GEDCOM, so you can have a backup on your computer or some kind of external storage. I might do this even more than once a month, given how often I add to it.
• Back up my scanned photos. Until a couple of days ago, my scanned photos, representing many, many hours of work, existed only on my desktop computer. I couldn't even copy them to my laptop, because I didn't have a flash drive big enough, and I was too lazy to do it in a bunch of chunks. Luckily, I now have a 32GB flash drive (omg it's so tiny!), which should take a while to fill up. I'll be backing these up every time I scan another batch.
• Back up my bookmarks. Often, we bookmark sites we find that have goldmines of genealogical information on them. Luckily, this is an area I've had mastered for years. I recommend Xmarks, which is what I use, but most browsers also have their own built-in bookmark backer-uppers (yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a word). With Xmarks, every time I bookmark something, it gets automatically backed up to my online account. Another great thing about it is you can have multiple computers hooked up to the same account, so your bookmarks are synced between all of them! You can also access your bookmarks at the library just by going to your online account. This is all taken care of automatically, so I don't even have to think about it.

One thing to consider is that you should not only have two copies of your data, but those two copies should not be in the same physical place. One copy on your computer and one on the Internet is great. One copy on your computer and one on your flash drive that you keep at home is not so great. In the event of a fire or some other natural disaster, all copies could be destroyed at once. I'm a bit worried about this right now, since I also have original photos in my apartment along with the digital copies.

For data that you aren't backing up on the Internet, I recommend having a copy on a flash drive or DVD that you give to someone else for safekeeping. For example, when I'm done scanning all my grandma's photos, I'm going to give her a copy of the files on DVD. That way, a copy is always safe. Even if you just have a flash drive or external hard drive with a copy of all your data on it that you keep in your desk at work, that's providing another level of security for your data.

I hope this post hasn't been to heavy! Once you get into a routine, it's really easy to have all your data secured, and it can really put your mind at ease. What else do you recommend for genealogists' data backup routines?

Advent Calendar - December 1: The Christmas Tree

This is the first post in a series for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. See all my posts in this series.

Growing up, my family always had the same artificial Christmas tree. It's about 6.5 feet tall, and fairly bushy. It loses pine needles all over the carpet every year, but somehow it still looks good and full. Every year, usually some time in November, my dad would drag the tree out of the back room and set it up. I think my sister and I did most of the decorating, with my mom helping to make sure we "did it right". Oh, moms. The decorations are a combination of some storebought ornaments and a whole lotta crafts made by Girl Guides.

That tree is still the one at my parents' house, but my sister and I recently moved out, so we've got our own trees, now. This is our first Christmas away from home. Jonathon and I bought our own artificial tree. It's 7.5 feet tall and unbelievably wide. When we started to set it up in the apartment we were afraid it wouldn't fit, but we eventually figured it out.

My mom let my sister and I each take some ornaments from the family collection that are special to us, so we won't be starting out with nothing on the tree. We'll probably buy a few things each year to add to it, and one day we'll have a kid who can make crafts to hang on it. And so the cycle continues.

Here's Jonathon putting the angel on top of the tree last year: