Month: December 2009

Loblaws Giveaway Winner!

Holy gingerbread snaps, did you see all the comments on the Loblaws Insider’s Report giveaway post? Congratulations to JustAnOttawaDad, winner of the basket of PC holiday treats!

I am blown away by the number of entries to this contest — I don’t think I’ve ever had a contest go more than a hundred comments, let alone the additional 50 or so tweets on Twitter, and a good handful of blog posts, too. Thanks to everyone who played along! And special thanks to Hill and Knowlton and Loblaws for making this giveaway possible.

(Stay tuned, I plan to continue bragging — erm, I mean, blogging, about the products in my PC grocery advent calendar for the rest of the month!)

Five ways to interact with Santa

Back in the day, the only ways you could “interact” with Santa were to stand in line at the mall to sit on his knee, or maybe at your parents’ annual company Christmas party.

Now that we live in an interactive world, though, not only can your kids write a letter to Santa, or listen to Christmas Eve updates of his whereabouts from the local weather man, but you can get e-mails, videos and track the big dude yourself starting early in December. Here are five fun ways for kids to communicate with Santa, starting with my fave.

1. The Portable North Pole. I love this app, madly and deeply. Whomever came up with this and put it together is brilliant. I did this last year and the look on the boys’ faces was priceless — and though I haven’t been all the way through it this year, I can see they’ve made even more improvements and personalization. You the parent have to go in ahead of time and set it up, supplying your kids’ first names, something they’ve done that’s good, a photo if you like, and other personalized details. They give you a link to a video, and you can visit it later with your kids. I must remember to go in tonight to set up all three boys, so they’ll know Santa is thinking about them!

2. Letters and e-mails to Santa. Yes, it’s true, you can e-mail Santa and he’ll reply, but isn’t the ritual of writing and sending an actual paper letter, and then the eye-popping excitement of getting something back in the mail box, worth the extra effort? In Canada, you have to mail your letters before December 16 if you want a reply. Mail to:

Santa Claus
North Pole
H0H 0H0

Or you can send an e-mail through canadapost.ca/santascorner. (Hmmm, in the US, it seems that the US Postal Service has stopped providing a Letters to Santa service this year. Any other ideas from our American friends?)

3. Norad’s Santa Tracker. When I was a kid, I remember watching with slack-jawed wonder as Percy Saltzman, the weather man on Global News, talked about Norad tracking Santa as he began his journey around the world on Christmas Eve. I think just about everybody has heard of Norad’s Santa Tracking service, but I had no idea of this charming history to the project, courtesy of WikiPedia:

In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in.

In 1997, Canadian Major Jamie Robertson took over the program and expanded it to the Web where corporation-donated services have given the tradition global accessibility. In 2004, NORAD received more than 35,000 e-mails, 55,000 calls and 912 million hits on the Santa-tracking website from 181 countries. The site now gets well over 1 billion hits.

Love it!

4. Friend Santa’s on Facebook Last year, there was a kerfuffle online when Facebook refused to let Santa have more than 5000 friends but the Norad Tracks Santa page has more than 37,000 fans. And if you’re in it for the presents, the I Believe In Santa Claus group has more than 150,000 fans and seems to have regular giveaways.

5. Follow Santa on Twitter. Alas, Santa is not immune to the celebrity social media phenomenon of having squatters steal his identity, but you can trust updates from @noradsanta (official twitter ID of the Norad Santa Tracker project) and @SantaClaus is keeping a public list of who’s naughty and nice! (And, those of you with a more cynical inclination to the holidays might appreciate the tweets of @loadedsanta, definitely not safe for kids!)

PC Holiday Package Update

Wow, more than 140 entries in the Loblaws / PC Holiday giveaway! I think that’s my busiest contest ever!!

Since the folks at Loblaws and Hill and Knowlton were nice enough to package up an advent calendar full of grocery gifts, and since some of you seemed as tickled by their efforts as I was, I thought it would be nice to give you periodic updates on the products as we open them. (We might not last the full 25 days, though. Beloved is worse than the boys and has asked three times today if he can open the rest of the packages, now living happily under the Christmas tree.)

Here’s what we’ve opened so far:

Day 1 – PC Mulled Apple. Our thoughts? A sparkly alternative to regular cider, but we’re not big soda drinkers around here. Would be great to have around for guests for a holiday party, though!

Day 2 – PC Cake Server. Used it on Beloved’s birthday cake two days later — so much easier than using two butter knives, my usual classy approach to cakes. Thumbs up! Bonus? Shiny!

Day 3 – PC Truffles Dusted With Cocoa Powder. Okay, so these? Are AMAZING! I am not really a truffle fan, and I’m not really even much of a chocolate fan. In fact, I don’t care for dark chocolate at all. But these are fantastic. It’s the perfect one-bite treat to go with a hot cup of coffee.

PC Truffles Dusted With Cocoa Powder

Which brings me to…

Day 4 – PC Gourmet Coffee. I mean, it’s like they knew it was Beloved’s birthday. A cake server, a box of truffles and coffee — really, I couldn’t have planned a better gift! And the next day’s package had Beloved’s sweet-tooth in mind, too…

Day 5 – PC Sweet Grinder. I already love my PC Salt and Pepper Grinder, but this one gives it a whole new (snicker) twist: Chocolate, cinnamon and sugar in a grinder. Beloved made pancakes for the boys on Saturday morning and they used this liberally as a topping. Such a daddy-and-the-boys meal!

Day 6 – PC Cranberry Orange Sauce. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what to do with this. The jar says it can be used as a cooking sauce, or simply as a treat over crackers and cheese. I think I’ll save this one for company on Christmas Eve.

And you still have one more day to enter to win your own gift basket of party treats from the PC Insider’s Report. Don’t be intimidated by the number of entries — someone has to win it! And if you’ve already entered — good luck!

Project 365: Why is this getting harder instead of easier?!?

One might think that 10 months into a year-long photo-a-day project, the going would be getting easier instead of harder. Not so much! In fact, I’ve had more days that I almost didn’t get a picture at all this week than I think I’ve had since the second week in. I’ve just been so busy… finding time for not just any old photograph, but a good photograph? Challenging, to say the least.

But, I made it through another week. Remember last week when I said I’d save the close-up pic of the old Underwood typewriter keys for a day when I had nothing else to photograph? Yep, here it is!

312:365 Typewriter keys

I swear, I’m beginning to think there’s nothing I haven’t photographed, and some of my pictures are starting to look alarmingly similar. I didn’t realize until I saw them side-by-each how much this lamppost and my TtV trees looked to each other — occupational hazzard of taking pix at the same time of day with the same camera, I guess.

311:365 TtV lamp post

You’d think after 40 years on the planet, I’d get used to mid-afternoon sunsets in December — but they still seem improbably early to me. I caught this on the way home from work, and thought it was nice of those geese to oblige me with a little extra flair in my sunset picture. (As opposed to the flare. Snicker.)

315:365 Sunset in the afternoon

We got our first snow here in Ottawa this week, so of course I had to record it for photographic posterity.

314:365 First snow!

And at the other end of nature’s spectrum, we have my sweet little Christmas cactus. I love my Christmas cactus. For most of the year, I completely ignore it, only remembering to water it when the poor thing is covered in dust bunnies and cobwebs, and it sits unobtrusively on the windowsill in my stairway, catching about 10 minutes of sunlight each day. Then each December, it erupts into spectacular blooms like this. I wish more things in my life thrived on benign neglect!

316:365 Christmas cactus TtV

You’ve already seen this one, but its unbearable cuteness bears reposting, right?

313:365 Christmas card outtake

And speaking of unbearable cuteness, when I set up the tripod to capture a picture of me playing with Lucas, I was thinking of the amazing style of my friend Angela, one of my fave photographers on Flickr. She may have inspired these shots, but I have a loooooong way to go before my stuff is as good as her pix of herself and her kids. Besides, I said I wanted to do a selfie each month in my 365, and I don’t think I’ve done one since July. This one is the only outtake that was worth keeping — selfies are a lot harder than they look!

317b:365 Playing with Mum

And this one is totally not what I was going for, but I really like how it came out in the end. (Hmmm, a lot of my faves end up being a long way from my original conception. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere!)

317:365 Hugs

And finally, was it me or did the month of November just fly by? Here it is, November 2009 in pictures.

November mosaic

Loblaws Holiday Giveaway!

When my friends at Hill and Knowlton asked me if I’d be interested in sponsoring a Loblaws / President’s Choice holiday giveaway, I was torn. I have a very intense relationship with Loblaws, even though I’m pretty sure Loblaws doesn’t even know I exist. (Seems alarmingly like most of my high school relationships, now that I think of it.)

See, on the one hand, I love Loblaws. I shop there or at the Independent across the street every single week, and I love their stuff. I especially love the Insider’s Report, and I’m absurdly and perhaps unhealthily excited when new products come out. On the other hand, Loblaws does occasionally make me so crazy that I want to divorce them and run away with Sobey’s. On the other other hand, you know I love Hill and Knowlton and the fun projects they bring to us. And when I accepted their offer of a bunch of new products from the Insiders Report based on a caveat that we could also put together a giveaway for you guys, they didn’t blink an eye. Really, I got on board this bloggy giveaway as much because of H&K as because of Loblaws.

So I knew I would be getting a big box of samples to try, and I knew we’d set up a giveaway for you to share in the bounty. What I did not expect was this:

Loblaws2

I mean, that’s a REALLY big box. And do you know what was inside? I so love this! They had individually wrapped and labeled 25 packages with the numbers one through 25. The box arrived on December 1st. Yes, they mailed me a giant grocery advent calendar full of President’s Choice products from the Holiday Insider’s Report. How awesome is that?

Loblaws1

The boys were beside themselves with excitement at this amazing box of presents, and had a great time lining them all up in numerical order. (Lookit me go, presents + free food + teaching opportunity! What fun!) Then they opened up package number one, which was a bottle of PC Mulled Cider (I looked, but couldn’t find a link. Another thing that makes me squirrelly about PC – the search engine is questionable at best). The boys don’t really like pop, but they asked for a sample of this with dinner and both agreed it was a sparkly twist on plain old cider.

Loblaws3

The December 2 package contained a shiny (ooo, shiny!) new PC Cake Server. I’m not sure if I can be patient enough to keep opening just one package per day when I know there are some really yummy treats in there, but so far we’re having a lot of fun with this.

(As you’ll see in the background of the photographs, we’re in the middle of transitioning from carpet to laminate, and finding a place to put 25 23 individually-wrapped grocery items is proving to be a lot more of a challenge than it might have posed on an ordinary week, since everything from the living room and dining room has been moved elsewhere in the house, including my overstuffed and oversized love seat and sofa taking up the entire kitchen. Currently, most of the treats from Loblaws are stacked in the front hall closet!)

So while this has been an unexpectedly delightful bloggy event (can we pause again to say how much I love H&K?) on my part, it gets better! Our friends at H&K have put together an amazing gift basket that one of you lucky bloggy peeps will win just in time for holiday entertaining season. (Or, the holiday “go away, it’s MINE, get yer own!” season, depending on how it rolls at your place.)

The gift basket is loaded with some of the best items for the PC Holiday Insiders Report, with holiday entertaining in mind.

Loblaws4

The gift basket includes:

  • PC Mulled Apple
  • PC Raspberry Martini Mocktail
  • PC Chocolate Egg Nog
  • PC Mini (6”) holiday crackers
  • Belgian chocolate cookie tin
  • PC gingerbread bites
  • PC Scottish Shortbread
  • PC Apple Pecan Gourmet Topper
  • PC Holiday Chocolate Figurines

And lookit how they packaged it all up in a reuseable PC Green Bin tote for you. Awesome, eh? So here’s the details:

The contest is open from now through noon on Monday, December 7, 2009. There are three ways you can earn a ballot to enter this contest:

  1. Leave a comment below and tell me one treat you look forward to during the holiday season. Grandma’s shortbread? Your special-recipe stuffing? Swiss Chalet’s Festive Special? What taste tells you it’s holiday time?
  2. Write about the contest on your blog, linking to this post, and come back and leave me a comment with the URL to let me know about it.
  3. Tweet the contest on twitter using hashtag #PC_Holiday and linking to this blog post, and leave me a comment with a link to your status update. (You can create a direct link to your Twitter update by clicking on the time of the update and saving that link.) You can use tinyurl http://tinyurl.com/ye6ayq2

The fine print: this contest is open to Canadian residents only. One winner will be chosen by using the random number generator at random.org, selected from all eligible entries. The winner will be announced the afternoon or evening of December 7, 2009. You must be willing to share your mailing address with me, and I will share it with Hill and Knowlton Canada, who will ship the prize directly to the winner.

You can buy President’s Choice products at Loblaws, Independent, Extra Foods, No Frills, Superstore, Fortinos, ValuMart, Zehrs, Maxi, Provigo, SaveEasy and Dominion — here’s an online store locator!

Thanks to Loblaws and Hill and Knowlton for another fun giveaway. Good luck to all!

I’m trapped in the basement! Vote for me to set me free!!

Okay, so the fact that I’m trapped in the basement (they’re installing the laminate over my head as I type) and the fact that I’ve been nominated for Best Family Blog in the Canadian Blog Awards are completely unrelated. And yet, they’re the best segue I’ve got. Save me from the noise (oh my sweet lord, the noise!) and the dust and the chaos, send me a vote as a salve on my twitchy soul. (Too much? Yeah, I was afraid of that.)

Ahem, anyway, they’re using a new voting system this year, and while it looks a little bit intimidating, it’s not too bad. If you would like to vote for me (please please please?) these instructions will help you navigate through.

  1. Click on this link to the Best Family Blog poll and it will open the voting page in a new window.

  2. Scroll down until you find Postcards for the Mothership.

  3. Click on the little drop-down triangle immediately to the right of the blog title.

  4. Select “1st”. Cuz you love me, right?

  5. Optional: there are lots of other great blogs in this list, so if you want to choose more than one, you can rank your choices and toss a vote to all your favourites. I’m not entirely sure I understand the ranking system, though. You don’t have to rank or choose more than one blog to vote, though.

  6. Scroll down to the bottom of the poll and click “vote”.

  7. Press “confirm”.

  8. Bask in the sunshine of my everlasting gratitude!

This is round one, and there will be a round two for the top ten vote-getters next week. Throw me a vote and send me through to the finals?

And stay tuned, because I have an awesome holiday giveaway that starts later today or tomorrow — don’t miss it!!

Hooray for December!

I‘m always glad when November turns to December. Despite the short days and cold weather, December is a bright month filled with warmth. We got our first dusting of snow yesterday, which helps to add a festive feeling, and there’s plenty of talk of pending holiday lunches and get-togethers.

I even ordered my Christmas cards online last night! For the first time, inspired by your suggestions, I’ve made cards based on one of my photographs, which I just this moment realized that I forgot to upload and therefore cannot show you. (Oops!) Trust me when I tell you that it’s an adorable image. Here’s an out-take from the same photo session that I did not use, but which will give you an idea of the unbearable cuteness of it all:

313:365 Christmas card outtake

Aren’t they lovely? I swear, I love them more each time I look at this picture. And this is the out-take!

After much dithering, tinkering, uploading and testing, I was surprised to find myself choosing Costco’s photo lab for the cards. I’d toyed with Shutterfly, TinyPrints and a few others, but the price and functionality of the Costco site got me in the end. And since I do most of my photo developing with them, I know at least the photo quality will be high. I’ve ordered actual folded 5×7 cards instead of just flat photo postcard-style cards, and there are photos both inside and out. For about $1 a card, it was the best price by far, and with in-store pick-up, there is no shipping nor US$-Cnd$ conversion to worry about. The only thing I’m forgot to check is whether envelopes are included. If I remember, I’ll report back on the quality issue when I pick them up next week.

Do you feel the pull of the holidays yet? Are you mostly ready or just getting started? What’s next on your holiday to-do list?