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What are your favourite childhood memories? Wherever you grew up, and whatever your family situation was in your early years, there are likely to be certain memories that still make you smile.
In the summer of 2022, Comparethemarket’s life insurance team conducted a survey of adults to find out what are the most popular childhood memories. There were lots of common themes in the responses, and the top ten turned out to be:
Memory is a strange thing. Some memories feel like they just happened yesterday, when in fact they were years ago. And memories can be unexpectedly and sharply triggered through the senses by things like hearing a piece of music or smelling a long-forgotten scent. The sense of smell seems to be particularly important, and the Comparethemarket survey found that the following smells bring back childhood memories straightaway:
But what is the significance of these memories? Do they really matter? After all, they are a long time ago and life has moved on since then. Interestingly, the survey found that around a third of parents often look at photos from their childhood, and a quarter of parents believe it’s important to recreate similar memories with their own children. So childhood memories do still have an important part to play in our lives.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three steps you can take to keep your favourite childhood memories alive, so that you can pass them onto the next generation:
Gathering together old photographs can feel like a momentous task, and one that we understandably put off doing. Particularly when you consider the mix of media involved. This may include physical albums of photos from childhood, as well as either boxes or packets of photographs and negatives. There may also be CDs of photos from the early days of digital photos, and folders of photos on various computers. Depending on your age, you may also need to factor in an unknown quantity of photos from phones.
But the main aim at this stage is to know what you’ve got, and where it all is. And even though this is a daunting task, it will hopefully begin to stir happy memories as soon as you start getting involved in the task. So it is well worth setting aside a weekend to get the process started, and rediscovering something of your past.
Once you have located all your childhood photos, it’s a really good idea to digitise everything. Not only does this mean that you can then finally store copies of everything together in one place, but it will also help to preserve the life of your older photos. Physical photos can crease and fade, and you will begin to lose the power of those precious images unless you take action to rescue them.
In our recent guide How to Store Your Photos, we explore this topic in more detail. We cover four potential ways to digitise your photos:
We also explore various Cloud storage options for photos, such as general storage suppliers – Google, iCloud, MicrosoftOneDrive, DropBox etc – and more specialised photo storage solutions such as:
Read our article for more information and to help you decide on the best way of digitising and storing your photos.
And once you have everything digitised, you can then organise all your photos however you choose – for example by year, age, events etc.
Then comes the fun part of deciding how to display your favourite childhood photos!
As well as the digitised versions of your childhood photos that you now have, you may decide you want to display some of them in your home as wall art. This is a great way not only to tell your story and be reminded of it every day, but also to share your experiences with your own children and perhaps recreate some of those memories with them.
Why not create a gallery wall about your childhood? If you have a wall that you could use – for example in your living room, hall, staircase or kitchen – you could use that wall to feature your collection of favourite childhood memories. Choose a layout you like : for example a grid, a pattern such as a circle or heart shape, or totally random intervals and heights to create impact.
For further tips about how to create a stunning gallery wall check out our article How to curate the perfect gallery wall for your home.
And when thinking about the best media for your wall art, why not consider metal prints? They are high quality and will showcase the colours and textures of your photos at their best. They are also easy to clean and extremely durable : they can even be safely used outside with no risk of damage if you decide to display your childhood wall art in the garden.
If you do decide to create your wall art from metal prints, Print Your Memory can help. We can create custom metal prints from your digitised photos. They will be produced in pixel perfect ultra high definition on premium aluminium. Your prints will be delivered by either Royal Mail or Fedex so they will be with you as soon as you need them. And they will arrive with an integrated hook so will be ready to display as wall art straightaway.
We hope that this article has motivated you to sort out your childhood photos and find the best way of displaying your favourites in your home for all the family to enjoy.
Check back here soon for more lifestyle and photography tips from Print Your Memory.
