Remembering the little moments with a Memory Jar

Family Life

We’ve been remembering the little moments with a Memory Jar over the last year and it’s something we will continue with in 2020. Towards the end on 2018 I already knew that 2019 was going to be a challenging year and that life as we knew it would be changing. Life was very uncertain and I thought that we would definitely need to celebrate happy times whenever we got to enjoy them.

With that in mind when I spotted something on Facebook one day, I knew it was the perfect solution and that we could spend time in 2019 remembering the little moments with a Memory Jar. I found a Kilner style glass jar in the cupboard, labelled it and bought a multi-coloured notepad and we were all set for the start of a new year.

The Memory Jar has lived on our kitchen windowsill ever since. Every Monday I’d sit down with my son and pick our favourite moments from the week before to write down and pop into the jar. Over the months there were some incredibly bleak days, some I knew were coming, some were tragic events that rocked us all. But just seeing that jar sat on our windowsill, slowly filling up with happy moments helped to keep us going even on the darkest of days.

It became such a visual way of showing us that there are always memories to be made, no matter how rough times are and it became quite a focal point for us over the coming months.

We had meant to empty the jar on New Years Eve but we get caught up with other things, so we started 2020 with a review of our memories from 2019 instead.

There were some moments that we’d totally forgotten about, and it was lovely to listen to my son reading them out and then having a discussion about each moment. There were definite highlights too, including my son’s first school residential in March.

It also became clear that as the year progressed we had really appreciated the time spent with special people, something we don’t take for granted any more after losing a dear friend.

At the start of the year we had dated our memories but that been forgotten as the year progressed. When my son had read out all of the memories to us, we talked about what we should do with these little notes. I hadn’t thought about that when we’d started the Memory Jar in January 2019. So what should we do with these pieces of paper? Throw them away or keep them? We’ve decided to keep them and my son wants to put them in an album. For now, I’ve put them all in an envelope just to keep them safe.

We’ve also learned that pink notes fade thanks to the sun coming through the kitchen window and I’m not sure if that’s affected some of the ink too, but we both liked this ageing effect.

Remembering the little moments with a Memory Jar has been a positive experience for us. I can often be a ‘glass half empty’ person, through in menopausal hormones and even when life is less uncertain, I’m in need of positive nudges. I also want my son to continue to see that even when he finds things challenging, there are always things to smile about. So are we continuing with our Memory Jar in 2020? You bet we are!