Christmas Lore Junk Journal
Hey, everyone! Julie Rohrer of August Birdsong, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Christmas Lore Junk Journal for us this week. As you know, we feature one new Junk Journal project each week created by one of our creative team of artists. Our Design Team Members select from the 100’s of Vintage Image Bundles on our Premium Membership Site, for their creations, in order to show you beautiful ways to use those images. We hope you will be totally inspired by this series!
Therefore, please make sure you check out the video tour at the bottom of the page…please scroll all the way down to see it. Are you ready to be inspired? I will step out of the way and let Julie tell you all about her lovely project…
Hello Everyone! Years ago, I wrote an essay about the origins of Santa Claus in which I learned that America’s Santa is really a compilation of many different cultures’ versions of Saint Nicholas. They were brought together in Clement Clarke Moore’s classic story, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. So when I learned that I would be creating a journal for December, I knew exactly where I wanted my tale to go.
Because I was going to bring in stories of Saint Nicholas from all over the world, I decided to have my cover reflect the universe in the night sky with this image of Santa on the moon.
I also remembered that throughout Russia, Saint Nicholas was associated with the reindeer people who lived north of the Arctic Circle. He was known to be a medicine man who helped the sick. Traveling through a smoke hole in the roof, he would drive his sled and reindeer throughout the universe looking for souls in need. Note: The lace trim I used on the cover and throughout the journal was torn from an old bed sheet.
The story of Santa Claus begins with the real Nicholas, who was a young orphan from present day Turkey, who was born around 280 A.D. His parents died of the plague but left him quite wealthy. He would become a bishop in the Christian church at 19 years old; therefore, my first page is of some cathedral doors that open. I used printable bookmarks from the Stained Glass Windows bundle to create the doors and just added paper hinges to make them open and close.
Nicholas was proclaimed a saint after he died in 343 A.D. Because he died on December 6th, the evening before, December 5th, became St. Nicholas Eve, when children hung their stockings on the hearth or placed shoes on the porch in hopes that St. Nicholas would leave them some treats.
This tradition began because of the story of young Nicholas helping the three sisters. One of the sisters was going to become a slave in order to give her other two sisters dowries, so they could marry. When Nicholas heard of this sacrifice, he visited the home of the sisters at night and dropped gold coins through the window into their stockings that were hung to dry.
Centuries passed with children hoping to receive simple treats like nuts, fruit, or toys from St. Nicholas. The lighted fir tree (pictured above) represented eternal life in the Christian church, and Martin Luther lit his tree with candles in 1536 A.D. after looking at the starry heavens of the night sky.
Among the Scandinavian cultures, Nicholas was known as SinterKlaas and often thought to be an elf-like being with mischievous helpers. I found some images for this section of my journal in the Scandinavian Christmas bundle. It’s believed that stories of SinterKlaas, which sounds a bit like Santa Claus, came over to America with Dutch immigrants in 1626.
So finally in 1822, Clement Clarke Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, also known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”, and American children discovered the joys of the very multicultural saint with his spirit of generosity.
In creating this visual journal, I found additional images of Santa Claus on The Graphic Fairy’s free blog, which is a wonderful additional site to the Premium Membership website for finding vintage photos and postcards as well as all different kinds of ephemera for your journal making needs.
There are many more pages and tags to be seen with this journal in my video tour of it on The Graphic Fairy’s YouTube channel. Find out how King Henry the 8th celebrated the 12 Days of Christmas in medieval times or what a Krampuskarten was. Do partridges really hang out in pear trees and how was a Christmas pudding in the 1500’s different from today’s pudding?
Happy Holidays!
CHRISTMAS LORE JUNK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR
Let’s take a tour of it together:
I used the following Bundles for this journal:
Angels Among Us
Autumn Botanicals
Autumn Harvest
Berries & Cherries
Delicate Endpapers
Dickens Christmas
Fall Botanicals
Holiday Dogs & Cats
Holiday Fruits & Flowers
Red & Green Ephemera
Scandinavian Christmas
Stained Glass Windows
Victorian Christmas
Winter Greenery
Woodland Wonders
Wreaths & Sprigs
Julie
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