Believe

In my previous job at a public library, I worked in the Children's Department as a storytime reader/planner. I sooooo enjoyed reading wonderful books to children as well as planning crafts, songs and fingerplays based on the theme of the books. One of my favorite themes to plan was Christmas. There was always an infinite number of wonderful holiday books to read but I always struggled to narrow the choice down to just three or four books. Earlier today I found myself browsing through my personal collection of Christmas books.  Why am I doing this in June? It's because the challenge at Jingle Belles is to use a Christmas story or movie as a prompt for creating a Christmas card. Isn't that just an extraordinary prompt?

For once, it didn't take me long to pull a Christmas book off the shelf and once I leafed through the pages I was in craft mode! I used a die to cut the bell and used punched boughs to frame it.  This isn't the card I had intended to make....more about this later.

So have you guessed which book I used as a prompt?  I chose a book by one of my favorite children's authors.  The book is also a very popular movie. The book that prompted my card is The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg?  Chris Van Allsburg just happens to be on my list of favorite children's authors and the movie features the voice of Tom Hanks (a favorite actor...I don't think I've ever seen a movie that starred Tom Hanks that I didn't like!)  Back to the card...

As I mentioned before, the card I had in mind isn't the one I created. As I began creating my card, my initial thought was to create a card that incorporated both the jingle bell and a ticket with the word "Believe" punched from cardstock to represent the ticket Tom Hanks punches and hands to the "Hero Boy". I made the ticket, carefully punching the letters to spell out the word "believe" but in the end it was somewhat difficult to read and it was too big to use along with the bell. So I scratched that idea and just included the strip with the word "believe" printed on small circles.

It's time to head back to the bookshelf to see what other Christmas Stories will inspire a card.  A special thanks to Irene from A Serendipitous Retirement who suggested this fabulous prompt for a Jingle Belles challenge!!!!