A real scrapbook for a real family -- the time has come
8:12 PM 1/25/03
Susan Lampert Smith Wisconsin State Journal

Normally I'm way behind the curve of trends, but this time I'm so sure I'm onto a winner that I'm going to reveal it publicly.

Ready? Here it is: dysfunctional family scrapbooking.

Either you already see the beauty of this, or I need to do some explaining. Scrapbooking is a trend that has been growing for about a decade. Some genius discovered that the guilty secret most middle class families have in common is that giant box of unsorted photos lurking in the downstairs closet. It makes us feel bad about wasting all that money on cameras, film, developing and vacations that our children will never remember. We also feel bad that we can't remember which dead uncle is Fred and which is Elmer.

Scrapbooking involves women getting together - often enough women to fill a high school gymnasium - and tackling those boxes of guilt-inducing photos. They finally take those really cute photos of their kids playing in snow, crop them to get rid of the snot-nosed neighbor kids, and decorate them with stickers of snowmen, snowflakes and mittens, and a story about how much fun they had that snowy day.

Women pay big bucks to buy photo albums, tools, paper and decorations. They also create some very nice documents of their family's history; I've seen beautiful books at weddings, funerals and the like.

The problem is that scrapbooking doesn't alleviate my guilt, it makes it worse. I still have that heaping box of old photos and I can't make one of those pretty scrapbooks. It's not only because I flunked paper and scissors in first grade. It's mostly because they just don't make stickers for families like mine.

My family's favorite stories revolve around vacations from hell, terrible holidays and the time Jim puked down the heat duct and everyone smelled it for years.

Our best Christmas story? The time Uncle Ray got so loaded he knocked over the Christmas tree and wound up sleeping in the creche with the miniature Baby Jesus.

Our best family bonding? The time cousin Barney got so mad about losing a challenge on a Scrabble word he threw over the board, cursed the whole family and stormed out. The rest of us have been laughing about it for years.

And vacation stories? Well, there are so many. Do the kids talk about those neat prairie dog villages? They do not. They reminisce fondly about all the swear words mommy said when the van overheated all the way across South Dakota. (And the extra cool swear words she said when she found out it was because the car dealer sold her a used van with cardboard crammed around the radiator.)

Then there was the time one kid announced he had to go just after we passed an oasis on the Northwest Tollway. We pulled over in rush hour traffic, but the kid couldn't perform on the roadside with all those cars beeping at him. So he went in a McDonald's cup, which the poor mom had to hold all the way to the next oasis to keep it from spilling.

Anyway, you understand. We could frame photos of Uncle Ray with booze bottles and broken ornaments, cousin Barney with Scrabble tiles, the Black Hills trip with pieces of cardboard covered with !@$&*! words and the Chicago trip with McDonald's wrappers.

The point is that while there are thousands of stickers for holidays and happy occasions, there are none at all for the way life really is. The possibilities are mind-boggling: beer kegs to symbolize graduation, overweight fannies in swimsuits for those beach vacations, and little mini restraining orders for all those family holidays.

I predict my No. 1 bestseller will be the universal symbol for banned substances, the red circle with the slash through it. You'll need it to paste over the face of every person in photos who has been divorced, excommunicated, shunned or otherwise kicked out of the family. Of course, you'll have to sell glue remover in the case of rehabilitation or reconciliation.

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: Happy families are all alike; the rest of us are a heck of a marketing opportunity.

Susan Lampert Smith writes about the people and places that make Wisconsin unique. Send her story ideas at ssmith@madison.com or to Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708.