National Home Movie Day is quickly becoming one of my favorite holidays.

It is celebrated in October – this year on the 20th – and we use the occasion to invite people with unmarked, unlabeled videotapes to bring them into our studio so we can play them on our equipment to look for lost or hidden memory treasures.

Thanks to all who participated this year. Trust me, we enjoy it and look forward to it every year. The stand out this year was a young mother and her eleven year old daughter who were on a quest. She was looking for her wedding tape and brought in about a dozen candidate tapes that it might have been on. The eleven year old just wanted to find the production of Grease that her mom was in when she was a kid because one Halloween she dressed up in her mom’s Pink Lady jacket from that production. This year, she’s going as a cop. With real handcuffs!

Sadly, tape after tape revealed not the sought after recordings but recordings that reflected the interests of years ago:  episodes of Beverly Hills 90210; a Super Bowl; a marathon Friends event; a special presentation of a US Open; and a myriad of HBO movies from various time periods.

I could see the frustration growing but we pressed on. We finally hit an unexpected jackpot on the final tape. It started off like the others – nothing of current interest – but suddenly the scene cut to a Christmas morning with the family gathered around a tree opening presents that were wrapped some 20 or 25 years ago. The daughter squealed with delight as she saw younger versions of her aunts and uncles on the screen.

It made our day.  And we’d like to make yours. Bring your films, tapes, slides and more to our studio and let us convert them to a digital form that will last for future generations. Your children’s children will thank you.

Update: The mom dropped back in today with 3 more tapes. She found Grease and her wedding – she had put them in her safe deposit box for safe keeping prior to hurricane season. Now she’s digitalizing them for permanent security.  I love happy endings.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of videotapes, film, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.