With Christmas approaching, Saoirse set out to make her grandmother a Keepster book for Christmas.
In any normal (non-pandemic) year all their family would gather at her grandmother’s house for the holidays, but with that being impossible in 2020, Saoirse really wanted her grandmother’s gift to be a comfort and a reminder of how much she is loved by their entire family. Using Keepster, Saoirse was able to gather the highlights of their family-wide group chat and ‘bookify’ them.
On Christmas Day, Saoirse went over to visit her grandmother, even though it meant standing outside. From the doorway, her grandmother told her how much the book meant to her, in a way that actually made Saoirse want to cry. What’s more, her uncle kept posting snaps of the book into their family group chat, also making Saoirse so proud of the gift that she’d made.
Aside from being the perfect gift for her grandmother, Saoirse realized she also needed to make a book as a gift to herself! The hardest part of the whole process was actually choosing which messages to include: she could have made a book that included them all, but finally decided upon a collection of highlights.
In doing so, Saoirse took a trip down memory lane. Being able to search her messages by keyword or send date made the process so easy. She flipped through years of messages with her grandmother, cute family texts, pictures (including family food fights!) remembering the early days of new friendships, and then organized all those messages into folders as she saw fit. Since Saoirse lives away from home, simply knowing that her favorite correspondences (including photos) were all in one tangible place, brought so much comfort.
Once she’d selected the messages, Saoirse got creative, choosing the title, cover color and design (the Hanley family crest for her grandmother, a starry sky for herself), the dedication at the front of the book, and the fonts. Having narrowed all that down, she was VERY pleasantly surprised to find that it was such a low price for such a priceless gift! The printing and postage time frame was measured at 5-7 days, and soon after, Saoirse became the very proud ‘mother’ of her very own Keepster book!
After such a strange and difficult year, the closeness and resilience of Saoirse’s loved ones is something she’ll never want to forget - and now there is her Keepster book to forever be a reminder of exactly that.
