“All aboard!” the conductor cries. “Well, are you coming?”

“Where?” the little boy asks.

“Why to the North Pole, of course,” the conductor answers. “This is the Polar Express.”

Chris Van Allsburg’s book, The Polar Express is a classic holiday picture book about a little boy to take a train ride on Christmas Eve to the North Pole. There he meets Santa and receives the special gift of a silver bell. If your kid’s enjoy reading this story or watching the movie, you might consider bringing them to experience the magic of Christmas firsthand aboard a real Polar Express train.

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If you’re anything like me, at the end of the summer you have a million photos of your kids in funny poses, silly faces and wildly fantastic expressions. Vacations and destinations are awesome, but preserving those memories in a way that will last (which doesn’t take much time) is a tall order when combined with back-to-school time.

Here are a few ideas that are sure to make for lasting memories without breaking the bank.

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I started preserving memories of my travels when I was a kid – taping Disney World tickets and Nantucket postcards into a traditional scrapbook, whose pages are now crumbly and yellowed. Then, in the 1990s when I vacationed a lot with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, I moved on to the Creative Memories brand of albums, where I decorated acid-free (archival-quality) pages in big books with not only my hard-copy photos, but colorful “frames,” stickers and borders. Lately, I’ve made photo-book gifts with digital images of special trips I’ve taken with extended family, and I’ve also experimented with Creative Memories’ digital software.

The bottom line: I love to scrapbook, and I wish I had more time to do it! Especially since my children love to pull out my custom-made photo albums and browse through them, exclaiming as they turn pages, “Remember the vacation when Ben got stung by a jellyfish?” and “That roller coaster went so fast!”

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The time has come. Your “baby” is going off to college. While this milestone is thrilling and exciting there are some things you can do to help the transition be a little less painless for them and you:

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