One Story: Winter Tales

The January Pocket Life kit, Winter Tales, is a quiet ode to winter — its sounds, its scents, and the memories it carries. While creating it, I kept returning to my own childhood, to winters so snowy that the drifts sometimes reached up to my waist. We spent our winter holidays in the countryside, and nothing felt better to me than wandering through a snow-covered forest or skating on a frozen pond. Those moments shaped the way I still feel about winter today — calm, crisp, and full of small magic. That’s why I included elements like a moose, an arctic fox, and ice skates in this kit. They’re not just decorative details, but gentle references to those memories that are still very much alive in my mind.

The color palette grew naturally from the same place. Deep blues reflect the evening sky and winter twilight, soft periwinkle echoes snow and ice, and green brings in the presence of evergreen trees — fir, pine, and cedar standing quietly in the forest. I softened the palette with touches of pink, inspired by the northern lights, and warm brown, reminiscent of a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day. In this post, I’m sharing one way I used the Winter Tales kit to tell a single story — not as a set of rules, but as an invitation to start your own.

For this story, I started with one of the free journaling prompts: “Describe a moment when winter felt magical.” It immediately resonated with the photos I had chosen, but as I sat down to write, I realized that a single moment wasn’t enough. Instead, I changed one small word — moment became day. That day in Kaltenbronn truly felt magical from beginning to end. There was something almost unreal about the beauty of winter in that forest, as if we had stepped into a perfectly preserved winter wonderland. This small adjustment gave me more space to tell the story honestly. It allowed me to write not just about one snapshot in time, but about the full experience — the walk through the forest, the playfulness in the snow, and the quiet warmth that followed. For me, this is exactly how prompts work best: not as fixed questions, but as flexible starting points that can be reshaped to fit your memories.

For the left side of the spread, I chose two photos and placed them one above the other. I liked how this vertical layout echoed the tall trees in the forest and helped keep the composition calm and grounded. At the very top of the two photos, I added a snowflake embellishment to visually tie them together and reinforce the winter theme without overwhelming the images. Above the photos, I added two stamps and a tag — each of them carefully chosen to match the overall mood and concept of the page. Rather than decorating for the sake of it, I wanted every element to feel connected to the winter atmosphere and the story I was about to tell. Below the photos, before starting the journaling itself, I placed one more stamp. This small detail helps anchor the story by drawing attention to the time, the place, and the main theme of the page, gently guiding the reader into the narrative. The final touch on this side was the beginning of the story — a few lines about how and why we ended up in this beautiful place, setting the scene for everything that follows.

I started the right side of the spread with journaling, where I described everything that made this day feel truly magical — a direct reflection of the prompt I had chosen earlier. Writing first helped me stay focused on the story rather than the decoration, allowing the words to lead the rest of the page. At the very bottom, I added one more photo to visually close the story. Between the text and the image, I placed a moose figure along with a tag featuring pine cones, which I resized by trimming it down from a journaling card. These elements act as a soft transition between words and image, while also reinforcing the winter forest theme of the spread. This combination of journaling, imagery, and subtle decorative details helped the page feel complete without overpowering the story itself.

This spread is just one example of how the Winter Tales kit can come together on a page. It started with a few photos, a gently adapted prompt, and a feeling I wanted to hold onto — and slowly grew into a story that feels complete and personal. For me, this is what memory keeping is really about. Not filling pages perfectly, but giving meaningful moments a place to live. The kit elements, stamps, and prompts are simply tools that help guide the process, while the story itself always comes first. I hope this post inspires you to use the Winter Tales kit to tell your own winter story — whether it’s a quiet walk through the forest, a childhood memory, or a single day that felt a little bit magical.

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