THANKFUL 2024

It’s that time of year again.

The time when I step away from the work, slide one of the many Thanksgiving side dishes into the oven and hunker down to carry out my favorite annual business tradition – making the “Thankful” video!

It’s been a while since I’ve explained what I’m looking for when I pull photos for this video. (You can of course scroll down a tetch if you’re antsy and you’d like to get right to the video). Are they the BEST photos from the year? The most technically perfect? The most aesthetically beautiful? The perfectly composed, exquisitely lit ones? The ones that end up on the wall or on the opening page of a McGuire Storybook or Lincoln Coffee Table Book?

Nope.

To make the video, I sit down and go through each family or newborn session from my year, squint my eyes a little, and grab the photos that, I think, FEEL like what I want every session to be. Real time spent with the people you love the most. Hugging them and playing with them. Doing the things you most like to do together. Encouraging them to show me who each of them is right now and how they interact with each other. Is it calm? Rarely. Is it chaotic? Usually. If my entire goal was to keep a family calm, I think we’d see a LOT more grumpy faces and many, many fewer awesome, unplanned moments that tell such truth and so tug at the heartstrings.

The next step is to cull through and re-order the photos to a digestible set. While I do this, I’ve got the same song playing on repeat in my head. The one that I talk about every year in this blog post. Not all the lyrics are on point, but that ONE line — now, still, the tagline of my business almost fifteen years in — ensures that this same song accompanies this video every year:

“Wherever time may take you in your life, remember this was beautiful.” ~The Pat McGuire Band

It’s not always easy to slow down and appreciate all the good each of us has in all of the chaos. That’s what Thanksgiving is for, and the fact that this FIFTEEN year tradition has always taken place a day before Thanksgiving is pretty perfect, if you ask me. Even before I’m “caught up” (haha, as if that ever happens) and ready to take a breath, making this video forces me to LOOK at what I believe my little business to be. And that fills me with gratitude. I’m truly SO thankful for all of you who trust me to capture your stories. Your support means the world to me, and I feel so lucky that I am able to do what I love because of you.

Here’s to a wonderful holiday filled with love, laughter and good food!

(If you’ve got time to take a wander through the past, starting with last year’s video HERE, I’m certain those feel-good vibes will last even longer).

Thanks for looking,

~Jaye