The unpleasant experience of scrapping holidays

I know the title sounds a little gloomy, but I think it's a dirty little secret in scrapbooking, at least for me: scrapping the holidays does not enthuse me in the slightest. Those things that happen every year-- Easter, Christmas, birthdays, etc.--just feel like the same thing every year. The same products, the same photos. Bleh.

Still, I'm trying to break through. For one thing, my boys LOVE the holiday pages. So one solution I tend to do with the holidays is making pages for their albums.

I also have been trying to create pages without the typical themed product. Here's one I just did for Dominic's birthday:

It's not his party--I still haven't scrapped that--but I LOVE these photos. He's just so absolutely delighted that my aunt made him a cupcake and we're singing him Happy Birthday. I used Studio Calico's kit So Cal rather than using birthday papers.

Here's some details:

 

  

 

There's something celebratory and happy about the papers and embellishments, but it doesn't look too much like a birthday cake. Well, maybe a little.

I also did something similar with Easter this year. I took the typical egg and basket photos, but what stood out for me the most was the fact that I had to threaten to eat their chocolate bunny ears to get a good photo. So that's my page.

(Just a quick product note: I found that stamp ink pads and a sponge work better on these Heidi Swapp mistable letters than mist, which runs. Go figure.)

Again, no bunnies or eggs in sight on the product. (I have issues with Easter or spring lines in general. Spring in Minnesota looks NOTHING like that. It's actually kind of brown here. Certainly not pastel.) I used Studio Calico's 35MM for this one. (I'm a little behind on using my kits, in case you can't tell, LOL! Hopefully I'll be finished with all but one by the end of the summer. Right now I've got three I'm using.) The camera images seemed especially appropriate.

So thank you for reading about what I loathe to scrap and how I deal and scrap anyway. Now tell me this: how do you feel about scrapping the holidays? :-)