Nobody starts a christmas junk journal in December. There is no time in December. The crafters who have one ready to fill by Christmas Eve started it in the quiet months, and July, oddly enough, is the traditional moment: Christmas-in-July is a real fixture on the craft calendar for exactly this reason.
This post is a plan for starting one now, built around the look that suits a christmas junk journal better than any other: the Victorian parlour. Aged letters, sheet music, poinsettias, plum and burgundy washes, a little gold. If you are new to the format, our guide to what a junk journal is covers the basics; here we get straight into pages.
Table of Contents
Why the Victorian look works for a christmas junk journal
Most of what we recognise as Christmas was assembled by the Victorians. The first commercial Christmas card was printed in London in 1843, the same year Dickens published A Christmas Carol, and the V&A keeps the original card in its collection.
That is why aged paper, copperplate handwriting and deep reds read as instantly festive. A christmas junk journal in this palette borrows 180 years of association and does not have to try very hard. It also ages well: pages that lean on old letters and music look better every year, while glitter-and-cartoon pages date fast.
Five christmas junk journal pages to build before December
Five pages is a realistic summer target. One a fortnight, and the journal is ready before the season starts.
1. The sheet-music base
Use a page of aged sheet music as the full background and cluster three poinsettias in the bottom corner. Add a strip of torn burgundy wash down one edge. This page needs no photo and sets the register for the whole journal.
2. Letters home
Layer two or three aged letters at angles, as if they had just been unfolded. On top, one journal line of your own: what you want to remember about this year. The contrast between old handwriting and yours is the whole point of the page.
3. The ornament frame
One photo inside an antique-gold ornament frame, centred on a plum wash. Frames like this carry a lot of visual weight, so resist adding anything else. If the page feels empty, it is finished.
4. The quiet page
Every christmas junk journal needs one page with almost nothing on it: a burgundy painterly wash, a single sprig, gold foil catching one corner. It gives the eye somewhere to rest between the busy spreads, the same way a rest works in music.
5. The Christmas Eve spread
Leave this one intentionally unfinished until the night itself. Build the background now, sheet music on the left and a plain wash on the right, and pencil in the spaces for one photo and a few written lines. A christmas junk journal with a page waiting for the actual evening is far more likely to get completed than one you assemble entirely in hindsight.
Digital first, printed if you like
All five pages work in Procreate, Canva or GoodNotes, layering transparent PNG elements over paper backgrounds. If you have not built pages this way before, our walkthrough on how to make a digital junk journal covers the mechanics in six steps.
Working digitally also means the journal can become December gifts: a finished spread prints as a card, and grandparents are reliably undone by a printed page with a child’s photo inside a gold frame.
For period atmosphere while you work, the Charles Dickens Museum in London is a good browse: the house where A Christmas Carol was written, kept much as it was, and a reminder of where this whole aesthetic comes from.
Putting it together: a worked example
The pages above use the Crimson Parlour bundle: 92 coordinated pieces including aged letters and sheet music, plum and burgundy painterly washes with gold foil, poinsettias and antique-gold ornament frames, all 12 x 12 inches at 300 DPI.
Because every piece in the Crimson Parlour digital scrapbook bundle is drawn in the same palette, the five pages above stay consistent without any colour-matching work, and the journal reads as one object rather than five experiments.
Start with the sheet-music page
It is the easiest win and it teaches the layering habit the rest of the christmas junk journal depends on. One page in July, and December-you inherits a journal instead of a to-do list.
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