Yearbooks: Memories on Demand
If you don't want to forget some of the best times in your life, it's a good idea to always invest in yearbooks every time you can. Buy them, keep them in good shape, and make sure they don't get hidden in the bottom of a box or in some storage unity where they'll be forgotten - they are a part of your history, display them!
Yearbooks range in price from free in some cases, all the way up into the hundred dollar range for the really extensive ones. Many times if you're in a small group, free ones will just soft of people like glorified pamphlets, but the point in those cases is just to have something to hold onto.
So when do you typically get yearbooks? You'll get them almost every year that you're in school, from elementary on up through high school, and then many colleges offer then as well. There are military and corporate yearbooks as well, and sometimes smaller versions of them for shorter-lived events.
They can be either soft or hardbound depending on the supplier, and can be completely black and white, completely in color, or have special pages that are in color inside of mostly black and white. The quality of printing varies per product, so if you're thinking about ordering a special set - so make sure to check on samples before purchasing.
Yearbooks will keep some of your favorite personal memories stored as well, since in many cases, you have your best friends sign the inside covers, and you can always go back to those short messages and relive the emotional value of that time period, succinct and handwritten by the people you cared about.
And we all know how much fun it is to break out the yearbooks during parties, so everyone can have their shared moments. You go to your bookshelf, dust out copies that are a few years old, or even a few decades old, and think about how far you've come along since those days.
If you're a parent, you are well aware of the importance of these books as keepsakes for your children, and you will use every opportunity that you can to show your kids that you were a kid once too, and how funny you dressed and how bad your haircut was. These are rites of passage, all neatly nested into a static but living collection of photographic images that you should be sure to show off. Many even show your old activities, and you'll remember them fondly.
Now that you're thinking about all of this, I imagine you're going to go grab your nearest yearbook right now! So every time you can, be sure to purchase a yearbook, as it's a professional presentation of your past, and is a collectible item that you can pass on to your family through the years.
I'm a teacher with a passion for writing about yearbooks.