Holiday Gifts

As soon as Sebastian finishes getting his guns organized, we’re off to our now annual winter camping trip. This time we’re staying two nights instead of one. However, we’re much better off this year thanks to the ever so thoughtful Christmas gift of a 2-person -25 degree sleeping bag.

4. The painted wooden cat statue was another Christmas gift.

My brother had gotten me this book as a Christmas gift, which I did not pick up and read up until a week ago. After I started reading Death Match it was hard for me to put it down. Being the first time I have read anything from Lincoln Child, this book definitely makes an impression on me.

Most importantly, because the iPod has no contract associated with it it’s a Christmas/birthday gift. In fact, it’s the gift. What percentage of iPods were given rather than purchased by the end user? From data I’ve found, it appears to be over 27% for Christmas alone.

Need a Christmas gift idea this year? How about new rulers or at least a gift card from Heirloom Creations!

We were drawn in by the posters promising the new Honeysuckle fragrance - after they discontinued honeysuckle years ago I kept one lone bottle of the shower gel tucked away for special occasions. I finally used it up when I was pregnant, so I was thrilled to find honeysuckle again! I’d been carrying a Christmas gift card in my wallet for just such an impulse purchase.

A few of years ago…my mom gave me an Elann Sample Skein subscription as a Christmas gift. I was so excited when the first installment arrived…the tiny skeins were all in shades of off white and I recall thinking that I could knit a long ecru scarf with my year’s worth of samples…until the February installment arrived and all the samples were in shades of blue. As my padded envelope arrived each month it was clear that a scarf still could indeed be knit with the samples but it would end up looking very patchwork and I am good with that. I decided to wait until my subscription ran out before beginning the project so I could play with all the colors and figure out the proper placement. I am actually just closing my eyes and pulling a skein out of the bag when one color runs out so the scarf is being knit totally random.

I also spent a few hours today music on my computer and deciding what songs to put on my mp3 player now that it can hold twice as much music (2GB instead of 1), thanks to a new memory card from my parents (another Christmas gift). Originally I had started to look through my music to find a new, non-Christmas ringtone, but I forgot about that intention until just now as I was writing this. So once this entry is posted, I’ll get back to finding a new ringtone.

We also visited Nordstrom. Where Becky and I spent some Christmas gift cards we had received. I got new shoes.

And thanks to some Christmas gift cards, I’ve stocked up on books by John Piper, A.W. Tozer, J.I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, and John MacArthur to help me sort it all out. Now if I can just find the time to read them!

had quite a few e-mails about my Gifts In A Jar post a couple weeks ago, so since we are in the last minute Christmas rush, I thought I would share even more ideas on this topic. My friends Susanne and Nicole are offering an e-book with 200 Jar Gift Recipes!

I saw a commercial from Crest today about how some mechanical toothbrush they have is the best give you can give this Christmas. Given, I think they meant it as a gift for your teeth, but it got me thinking, nonetheless.

Back to the Christmas theme and I added a few articles about the various Christmas gifts that you can give such as a watch or wine gifts. You can guess which christmas present I would prefer!

Kids will love to help you with this project too! Let them pick the scents or colors of candles for each person getting a candle basket. Put the candles and candle holders in a small basket (again, don’t pass up chances to get cool baskets at discount stores all year long…they come in handy during holiday gift giving!). Cover the basket with colored cellophane, and tie the package at the top with different color ribbons.

Alright, this dollhouse makes me so giddy with excitement. I plan to paint this house for Penelope. A perfect Christmas gift. I plan to paint dolls and maybe make the furniture. I don’t know- any suggestions? Oh- only $2 bucks.

If I had lots more money than I do, I’d buy a Brunton Solar Roll to power my laptop. I’ve collected lots of useful information on that laptop, in a NoteTaker notebook. Thanks to my generous and ingenious brother who made some excuse about a late Christmas gift, we now have a Brunton Solar Port 4.4 portable power source with a battery charger, which will recharge AA batteries, charge a cell phone, and, with an adapter, even provide the laptop limited juice.

As I reflected on this, I realized that children tend to remember the little things: fixing the broken bike, going for a walk down at the river, taking out the nasty splinter, and best of all, being available when they need to talk. The big vacation, special birthday party, expensive Christmas gift all may be meaningful at the time, but what our kids need is us, folding down the computer screen, turning over the book, listening, empathizing, considering, and then giving them the words they need. Little things like these make for a life time of investment.

The handmade Christmas gift of 2005 was a Megan-Guy collaboration, an unholy alliance of yarn and metal- the knit chainmail purse. I was originally inspired by this project on the blog Now Norma Knits, a knitted and felted purse with beaded handles. Beaded handles are nice, but I had a man with mad chainmail skillz I needed to exploit.

I found that chair for $1 at a garage sale. The Hershey’s tin, which I think is just so cool, was a Christmas gift. (It took me and my coworkers like 3 weeks to eat all the chocolate in it.) A lot of these planters I made from the buckets cat litter comes in.

On an unrelated note I used my ITunes Christmas gift card to download two albums by “The Brobdingnagian Bards” They are great. They are a bit like “They Might Be Giants” if They Might Be Giants were Irish and went to a lot of Renaissance Faires. Good Stuff!

I have plenty of New Year’s resolutions and I am excited about most of them. But I have also had a New Year’s revelation. I am greeting 2006 as a free woman. I was feeling rather blue about it all when I awoke yesterday morning. But, thanks to a couple of friends, my attitude has been adjusted. I received a late, but perfectly timed Christmas gift from Maeve. A gift certificate to It’s a Wrap What a great surprise! It’s one of my favorite places to shop in Los Angeles. The note attached said “go and get yourself something girlie to pose in”. I find that I am excited again about planning my trip to Los Angeles, because this trip is going to be all about me.

Yet there is so much that I despise about the televised ad campaigns depicting youthful upper middle-class people surprising their loved ones with a red bow-topped luxury car in the driveway on Christmas morn. Every year, my angst grows toward these commercials. And today the Washington Times reports how real people participate in the luxury-car-Christmas-gift-buying trend:

Now Petsmart, to the best of my knowledge, does not carry snakes, but they do carry lizards. On a good day I can usually handle certain types of lizards, not that I know what type they are cause I sure can't look through a book and pick them out without panicking and crying, but I have seen a few that I have deemed as being "not the end of the world so long as they stay in their cage and I do not have to be close to them". Unfortunately, Petsmart did not have NtEotWsLaTSiTCaIDNHtbCtT lizards, they had some freakish looking things with long, ugly tails that made me panic, but not cry. (We refer to these as MMPbNC lizards.) Due to the presence of the MMPbNC lizards, I was unable to buy Buster! some Christmas gifts on my own and instead I had Janers do this for me. While I was shaking at the front of the store and waiting for her to return, I realized that I had become the pet owner I despised--the type who buys their animal Christmas gift as if the thing has any conception of what Christmas is or would care if it did not get gifts.

Hi all! I gotta report on how the 7th and 8th grade “community service” club I am advising is doing. So far this year, we have volunteer face-painted at a fall festival and helped to decorate a “giving” tree at my school where staff by items for families within our school in need. Also, my kids are really interested in helping animals so we are raising money for the local animal shelter by raffling off gift baskets- a cat theme, dog theme and (TONS) of candy baskets. We started off with our tickets at $1 each and haven’t gotten many people buying tickets. SO, the kids voted earlier this week to lower the price by half (which entailed them tracking down everyone who’d already bought tickets- but they did!) and guess what- we are rolling in the $$! I was a little worried there at first when they wanted to lower it, but hey they made the decision and they have sold every single ticket! They have been selling all the last week and the selling continues into next week! Teachers are putting in like $10 at a time for a chance to win!

I have a real adult bed now, (Or a reggy bed as I used to say when I was three) and it has a wonderful down comforter that actually fits. When I was moving to Eugene I decided to get a queen sized bed. This was a decent upgrade from the twin I had been stuck on my whole life. The only problem was I didn’t have any bedding for such a large bed. I got sheets and a hand me down blanket, but I thought the comforter would be a nice Christmas gift. The past 4 months I’ve been stretching my twin down comforter over my queen bed.

Just in time for Christmas, the global leader in trading cards ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ have released The King of Games. The cards feature new characters and monsters, and will test the competitors’ strategic minds, stimulating the mind as the game requires logical and quick thinking. The battle to be King of Duellists promises to be even more competitive this system with the release of Elemental Energy cards which offer the player powers never-before seen on the Yu-Gi-Oh! circuit.

So here it is, Thanksgiving Day. Now’s the time to think about getting that ole Christmas Tree up and decorated (if you’re going artificial that is.) So, what’s the best way to find one? Ah Yes, the local newspaper! The Thanksgiving Day edition is always overstuffed with those circular ad thingies…

Plush Puffs would make a great Christmas gift for cooks looking for a new ingredient to lend some pizzazz to an old or new recipe, or anyone that just loves marshmallows. For gift-giving, you can choose a “Take two Combo” (two bags of Plush Puffs), or a gift basket that includes a basket of three bags of Plush Puffs. All of these are available for ordering online at the Plush Puffs website

Seeing as how Sidney will be in Baghdad for the coming holidays, I’m celebrating Christmas in stages. The traditional holiday (December 25 – how predictable these civilians are!) I’ll spend with family, doing the traditional holiday thing. I’ll send Sidney a tiny but ghastly metallic tree I scooped up for $4.99 at Lowe’s, trimmed with an assortment of better-than-usual stogies (not from Lowe’s). If I figure out the idiosyncrasies of the oven in my new home, I might even get some cookies and biscotti baked and sent. Might.

Christmas time is a crazy time for wedding photographers. Pictures from a summer wedding make the perfect Christmas gift and it all happens in the span of two weeks. Wedding albums, parent albums, wall prints, Christmas cards…it’s rain or pour. So while I work to keep the doors open, bear with me. I have great plans for 2006!

The time is getting short to drop off your shoeboxes for Samaritan’s Purse. By now… it seems that everyone knows about them, but just in case some of you have never participated or even know about them, let me tell you a little bit about them.

32nd Craft Christmas Gift Sale (over 140 artisans, artist and designers) including clothing, jewelry and Christmas decorations.

I’ve made a lot of different things over the years. One year I made everyone’s Christmas gift and got them all professionally framed (very expensive darn it). There are a few things that I have made that stick out in my memory. I made my cousins baseball themed pictures with their favorite teams. I made a Precious Moments picture for my Aunt. I made a great picture that is a famous drawing by Bessie Pease Gutmann called Little Mother. When I had it framed at a shop in NY the owner had hung it up in the store until I came to pick it up and customers were commenting on it. I will have to take a picture of it to show you all. It was the first project I had done that was larger than 8X10.

I’m home! The drive wasn’t too bad, and I completely missed DC traffic, and pretty much made it home by 8:30. I spent all last night playing with my laptop, which was a Christmas gift back in 7th grade. It never worked correctly from the first time I ever used it, no matter what we did. So, anyway, you’d think that 7 years later it would completely useless…but not so! I plugged it in, deleted everything on it except for the vital things, and hooked it up to the DSL and it’s running faster than it ever did. Hollerrrrrr.

Wiggles backpack (another Christmas gift); Wiggles Big Red Car light; Jeff singing Wiggles doll; Henry the Octopus singing doll; Greg singing Wiggles doll (Greg's my favorite...); 2 pairs of Wiggle socks; Waggs the Dog singing doll; Murray singing Wiggles doll; Wiggles House playset with a Anthony figure

Parents, have you seen I Believe? It’s the text of the Nicene Creed, illustrated by Pauline Baynes, who also illustrated the Chronicles of Narnia and much of Tolkein’s work. It’s fabulous! We are perma-borrowing one from the library until we buy one ourselves, probably as a Christmas gift for Kate.

My mental lists of what I want and have to knit before Christmas continues to grow. I have several things to knit for the store and have three on needles already. I am hoping to knit a Rowan Botany 4ply vest for an old school friend in the UK as a Christmas gift and of course have ideas about a sweater for Alan……. I did manage to knit a short sleeve cotton sweater for my Mum and as it will be Summer at Christmas time her present is just waiting to be wrapped and mailed.

Years ago a friend of mine studied graphology and for a Christmas gift took a sample of my writing and prepared a thirty-some-odd page analysis based on that sample. Her results mirrored an assessment made on me using Myers-Briggs typology.

This is the first of 5 felted hats I need to make for Christmas gifts. I have a bunch of little girls who want hats. I have pink, blue, magenta, and two orange to make. I had borrowed Felted Knits to use one of the patterns, but tit didn't quite come out how I wanted to I started over with a pattern I made froma mish-mash of my felting hat experiences. I'm pretty pleased with it, but I am thinking I'll take all the left over yarn from all of these and make some felted flowers to tack on.

The rules of golf, with breathtaking photos. Sounds like a Christmas gift, if I ever heard of one.

I’m so excited! I just found a link to the BEST website! But I’m not going to share it, because if I do - it might give away what I’m doing for Christmas gifts this year.

Your Christmas gift, when you were ten years old was a shotgun (a BB gun if you were a ‘townie’).

Lastly I found some Rowan Kidsilk Haze with a coordin ating sparkle yarn to make the Knitty Tie one one caplet called Mellow Green, allthough I picked up a soft purpley-blue color. This will be for a Christmas gift for my grandmother and I'm sure that she'll love it. I also picked up some misc little gadgets there and the sweetest buttons for the baby sweater.

Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett. - A Christmas gift from a close friend.

Well we got an early Christmas gift today. The Aussie in-laws (Lorna and Denny)phoned us to say that they are going to be here for a visit at Christmas. They live in the beautiful Austalian city of Adelaide. They are going to give up a big chunk of their Aussie summer for a Canadian Christmas! Is that love or what?

Patrick and I are really looking forward to seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this weekend. My first Christmas gift to him was the BBC series on VHS.

Remember, last year's unappreciated and unused Christmas gift of a "sweater shaver" or "Salad Shooter," may be a perfect item for this year's yard sale.

Meanwhile, my Christmas gift to them of a stereo sits in a box in their house, and they've yet to say anything about it in the four months they've had it. I thought I was actually getting them something they could use, as their old stereo dates back to the stone age. I know they both listen to music, and they have old records and new CDs that could be played (it's a combo record player/AM-FM tuner/CD player).

I was using it on Sat in the car while driving around to pick everyone up for dboat. I remember putting it in my pants pocket and that's the last I ever saw of it. I figure since we had to change pretty often on Sat (from swim trunks to running pants) that it probably fell out and I didn't notice. Damn, I originally got the Shuffle because it's so lightweight and small and now it looks like those very same advantages have lead...

In itself, this cocoon with a scary face protruding from it is pretty weird. But we're more interested in the fact that it's a prop from a movie called Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Now that's a film we want to see... "Props from this movie are next to impossible to find," says seller 'killerklowncrazy', and something tells us they're probably not kidding. An ideal christmas gift for... well, we're not sure who, but we're...

Have you ever wondered what the top British shoe designers look like? Well, wonder no longer, here they are. How we would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Viva La Diva's 'Brit Pack' posed for this shoot. The beautiful lot are l-r Adele Clarke, Olivia Morris, Georgina Goodman, Rupert Sanderson, Jane Brown and Beatrix Ong, also known as 'the six people I hope put me on their Christmas gift list this year'. Click the image to see a bigger picture, or click here...

This blanket was a Christmas gift to my brother. The pattern came from the first issue of Crochet me. I think I made it a bit bigger though. As far as I know he really liked this blanket!

Oil prices reached a new high today. One expert says gas could be four bucks a gallon by December. That’ll take care of the Christmas gift problem. Give everyone a siphoning tube.

It is kind of late, so I will probably have to come back and edit my spelling and grammar, but I just had to throw this out as one of the best Christmas gift ideas ever! The whole family will love it. Teenage kids can record the MTV awards and keep it for years to come. You can hook up the VCR and record your old movies that are degrading in quality as I type.

Push to Talk doesn't look like it's actually happening any time soon in the UK (if at all) so in the meantime we'll be satisfying our instant chat urges with these Walkie Talkie watches. At �35 per watch, we know what everyone in our families will be getting this Christmas. And once everyone's kitted out, we'll be off on our annual Christmas day walk (annual exercise is very important to us) to play armies.

I just purchased a couple clearance plates from the Pfaltzgraff website. I got three of these plate sets, called Holiday Spice Tapas Plates. Cute as a button, four plates each 4” square, and perfect for those little Christmas gifts you always wind up needing at the last minute. Each set is on clearance for $7.58, so I thought they’d be very cute for gifts. May keep one for myself.