Thanksgiving is a time of hope and gratitude so let me just say that this November I am grateful for Jessica Helfand and her new book about scrapbooking. If you have ever been teased or chided about scrapbooking, you, too, will appreciate Scrapbooks: An American History, published by Yale University Press.

This colorful, coffee-table book puts what we do in historical and visual context and proves to friends and family that if there is a madness to our method, we are in good company.

Just as today's scrapbookers are scoffed at for prettying up their personal narratives, so too were the authors of so-called Peter and Polly books in which pictures of babies, children and adults were pasted into blank books and used to create personalized versions of makeshift romance novels. These blissful, sequential scrapbooks of the late 1890s and early 1900s were, writes Helfand, "anchored by cheerful milestones (birth, marriage babies) and impervious to melancholy (death, divorce, war)." They also were derided in the press as "Polyanna" books and bemoaned for their "lack of range and paucity of substance."

See here. We didn't invent scrap lifting or sugar-coating. We just improved on an established art form.

Likewise, Lydia Blanchard's 1922 scrapbook includes a familiar array of disenfranchised words cut from books and magazines and arranged on pages -- words like beauty, sisters, love and memories. By choosing to work with preprinted words, Blanchard, an artist from Natchitoches, La., "shields herself from too much direct emotional exposure," observes Helfand. "The language of collage offered the ideal imaginative outlet; it was at once playful and self-protective."

Get it? Modern scrapbookers who frame their pages with buzz words and clichés like dream, aspire, "cute as a bug," and "boys will be boys," aren't lazy, homogenous hacks caught in a never-ending spiral of consumerism. We're frolicsome, yet emotionally conflicted, artists, afraid of revealing too much of ourselves to our publics.

But the No. 1 reason why every scrapbooker should own -- and display -- Helfand's book is this: It is a reminder of what can happen to keepsakes that are lost, discarded or sold in estate sales.

No disrespect to Helfand. Her book is a beautiful tribute to the captivating biographies she has collected over the years -- 250 of them, which she safeguards in gray, archival boxes in her Connecticut studio. But not every wayward photo or scrapbook is lucky -- or compelling -- enough to find its way into the loving hands of a graphic artist or cultural ethnographer like Helfand.

Seriously. Have you ever wondered what would happen if our kids or our kids' kids didn't want the scrapbooks we create? Where would they end up? Would anybody care?

These are hard questions for those scrapbookers who naturally assume they are creating keepsakes to be horded and treasured by generations to come.

I remember browsing through a bin of old photos at Utah Book and Magazine on Main Street one day years ago. Many of the discarded portraits had names and dates. There were even photos of dead infants in their funeral clothes. At $15 each, they were the most expensive.

I felt so voyeuristic thumbing through someone else's personal belongings but soon felt a sense of disappointment and even outrage.

"Who could throw such things away?" I asked the clerk.

"Maybe the rightful owners don't know they exist," he shot back.

I bought three or four photos with the idea of tracking them down and surprising them.

In the epilogue to her book, Helfand writes about the boundary between public archive and private journal and what it's like to read other people's scrapbooks. She calls herself "an accidental biographer, making astonishing discoveries about other people's lives ? and consequently, developing new awareness of our own."

Helfand returned three of the scrapbooks featured in her book to their rightful heirs, including the one belonging to Lydia Blanchard. At least one of the recipients did not know her mother even kept a scrapbook.

With the hordes of scrapbook supplies that clutter our closets, that is probably not a problem for present-day memory makers. Even so, I'm going to make my kids read or at least look at Helfand's book, especially the last paragraph.

"To spend any time at all with these scrapbooks is to fall a little bit in love with the people who created them. They remind us of who we are, where we're going -- and perhaps why, in the end, it might actually matter."

Linda Fantin is a writer living in Minnesota. To comment on this article, e-mail livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Workshop: Give Thanks card box and cards

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to show your appreciation to others with this card box and matching card set. Call it the thank you gift that keeps on giving, well, thanks.

For our card box, we covered a Sonia handle purse from Creative Imaginations, but you also could hollow out an old book or repurpose a tissue box or decorate a metal lunch pail.

Decorative Materials: Cards and envelopes by Paper Source; s.e.i. Windsor and Madera Island patterned paper; MiniMmarks rub-ons and Thickers by American Crafts; felt flowers by Heidi Swapp; gem brads by Creative Imaginations; stickers by Mrs. Grossman's, Cloud 9 and Wedded Bliss, snaps by Making Memories; ribbon; buttons; silk flowers.