Category: How I love the Interwebs

A Christmas Traditions Meme

I was stuck in traffic recently (please let this ridiculous transit strike end soon!) and this meme presented itself to me. Most of it was originally scribbled on the back of a coupon for dog food, braced on the steering wheel of the car while Lucas snoozed in the car seat behind me. Feel free to filch it for your own blog, or play along in the comment box!

There are so many ways to celebrate the season, and once a family gets locked into a certain set of traditions nothing can break the spell. How do you handle these ones in your family?

1. Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?

Since I was a kid, we opened all our presents on Christmas Eve. Santa brought one present and stuffed our stockings for Christmas morning, and even as grown children living away from home, my brother and I insisted on a Christmas morning Santa present!

2. Donner or Donder?

Ahem. As most of you know, I have a personal stake in this one. Let’s just say it was a proud moment this year when we watched Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer on CBS, and Simon spent the whole hour hollering “Donder!! Not Donner!!” at the TV whenever Donner was on screen.

3. Turkey or ham?

I was going to include goose in here, but does anybody really eat a Christmas goose anymore? I know, there are probably lots of people who have Christmas lasagnes and Christmas meatloaf and whatnot, but it seems to fall generally into ham and turkey camps. We are firmly turkey people. (**Waves and blow kisses to mother**)

4. Gifts opened all at once, or one at a time?

The first time I ever spent Christmas away from home with my ex’s family, I was openmouthed with wonder (and a hint of dismay) at the frenzy of gift opening. Everybody got their pile of presents, and everybody just tore in like a bunch of present-piranhas, wrap flying everywhere. I’m firmly in the camp of savouring the gifts one at a time and enjoying watching everyone open their gifts.

5. Christmas tree: live or artificial?

I’ve never had a live tree before, and I toyed with the idea this year. Beloved mocked me. I do love our artificial tree, though. It’s seven feet tall and still full and fresh looking even though it’s more than 15 years old. And it looks better and better each year as the handmade ornaments from the kids slowly replace the store-bought ones!

6. Cards: boxed cards, family photo cards, or e-cards?

I’m a fan of the boxed card. In a perfect world, I’d love to do handmade, but… yeah. One year, we put a fridge magnet made out of Tristan’s first Santa picture in every card, and I always wanted to do that again.

7. Christmas lights: incandescent or LED?

I’ve switched over to LED, but I’m not a huge fan. I think the incandescent have a brighter, warmer glow, but I’m doing my part to save the polar bears.

8. Re-gift or not?

Am a shameless re-gifter, but rarely have the opportunity… the people who give me gifts have impeccable taste, for the most part!

9. Gift wrap or gift bags?

I lean to gift wrap on this one, mostly because I think kids like tearing through paper more than they like lifting out tissue paper. The environmental aspect makes me cringe, but we do try to recycle it all.

10. Best Christmas song?

David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s Little Drummer Boy

11. Best Christmas movie?

A Christmas Story. I simply cannot believe I do not own this movie — I even have a “Fra-gee-lee” ornament on my tree!! — after years and years of dropping hints. It never goes on sale after Christmas, and I now refuse to pick it up for myself, so each year I have to comb the TV listings to make sure we catch it when it comes to broadcast cable. We don’t even have a PVR to record it. It’s one of the great travesties of the season, I tell you!

12. Favourite family tradition?

All of them. Traditions are the cathedral of life to a creature of habit like me!

Okay, your turn. Do play along!!

On public service, partisanship and social media

Let’s say I have a hypothetical friend. She’s a lot like me, but let me stress this — she’s not me. We have a lot in common, though. We both view our jobs with the public service as something of a noble calling and a privilege to serve Canadians. She is such an amazing boss and mentor that she recently won a national award of excellence for people management. She is a little more senior than me in the management tree, a little more politically conservative, a lot more sophisticated about politics. We both have a blog. She and I have both called Stephen Harper an idiot on our blogs, me mostly over childcare issues and her over the recent economic statement fiasco.

As it turns out, she has recently applied for and been offered a new job in a new department. As this is the 21st century and she’s plenty savvy about social media, she wasn’t surprised when she went to meet the new team and found out that they’d googled her, and found her blog. She was surprised — and that’s a bit of an understatement — when the senior manager at the new department contacted her old senior manager and said that the political entries on her blog are contrary to the Public Service Code of Values and Ethics. (!!) They told her that not only did she have to agree to not ever blog about politics again, but to take down the existing political posts. Not posts critical about the department or the work environment or anything sensitive, mind you. Just the sort of observational rant that any citizen might make over drinks or the backyard fence. They said that this was a “dealbreaker.”

I am – hypothetically, of course – outraged over this. We’re talking about someone who blogs in a manner very similar to me, maybe 30 percent personal, 65 percent pop culture, 5 percent political. I’ve read the posts in question, and they’re no different than what you’d see in the average Letter to the Editor, if not a hell of a lot better written and a lot less vitriolic.

What do you think? Should an ordinary public servant be allowed the same freedoms as any citizen, to air their opinions – political or otherwise – on a private blog written on private time? And if it were you, would you dig in your heels and stick up for your rights or acquiesce for the sake of making nice with your new peeps?

Best Santa-social media mash-up EVER!

A colleague of mine (Hi Dawna!) tipped me off to this at a Christmas party the other day. If you are Canadian and have kids who still believe in the wonder of Santa, you *must* visit the Portable North Pole.

You answer a few questions like how old is your child, first name, gender, province of residence and a few others, and then upload a photo of your child (optional, but worth it!) Santa will e-mail them a personalized video greeting. Tristan and Simon were open-mouthed with wonder, especially when Santa opened his big book and said, “Hmmm, Tristan, let me see. Oh yes, here you are!” and turned his book to show Tristan’s name and a photo of him. Priceless at any cost, but totally free! (We had extra fun with ours because the photos I uploaded came from our trip to North Pole, New York earlier this year. Upped the believability factor by 10, IMHO!)

I sometimes have trouble finding personalized mass-produced trinkets with Tristan, Simon and Lucas written on them (dang, shoulda named them Ryan, Matthew and Michael!) but all three names were in the drop-down menu on Portable Santa. I’m highly impressed!

Give it a try, your kids will LOVE it!

Oh well.

This is the first year since I started blogging that I didn’t make it through to the final round of voting for the Canadian Blog Awards. There’s a good chance I’d be pouting right now if I weren’t so happy to see the blogs that DID make it to the final round, including two of my favourite bloggers (Don Mills Diva and Fawn) and two of the blogs I personally nominated (Under the Mad Hat and Party of 3).

If this news had come during my funk last week, I’m sure I’d have taken it extremely personally, wondering if I’d jumped the shark bloggily speaking. But after spending a thoroughly wonderful weekend having a visit from Marla and Josephine and having dinner with Andrea and her lovely family and then attending a baby shower for one of my very favourite people in the whole world, it’s hard to be unhappy about anything!

If you aren’t reading any of these fabulous blogs, you should be. Congratulations to all the nominees! Now I have to figure out how to get three more IP addresses so I can vote for all of them.

Apparently I put the “pen” in “penis”

Been getting a lot of blog fodder from CBC these days. Last week it was the top 10 TV shows courtesy of Q, and today’s post comes via old Spark podcasts I downloaded to listen to on our road trip this past weekend.

According to the artificial intelligence at GenderAnalyzer.com, there is a 76% probability that Postcards from the Mothership is written by a man. I found this rather curious until I scanned down my own current home page and realized I have three large block-quotes, at least one of which I know *is* written by a man. I got curious, and started dropping individual category pages into the analyzer:

We guess http://danigirl.ca/blog/category/mothering-without-a-licence/ is written by a man (54%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

We guess http://danigirl.ca/blog/category/it-is-all-about-me/ is written by a man (55%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

We think http://danigirl.ca/blog/category/the-wee-beasties/ is written by a man (71%).

We think http://danigirl.ca/blog/category/life-the-universe-and-everything/ is written by a man (75%).

We guess http://danigirl.ca/blog/category/ottawa-bar-harbor-2007/ is written by a man (57%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

Hmmm, my manliest writing is on random topics and when telling stories about the boys, and writing I do specifically on mothering is my most gender-neutral. Interesting, in a passing sort of way. Go ahead, go plug your blog in there, then come back and tell me your results. You know you want to!!

***

Speaking of “you know you want to…”, it’s that time of year again. Even though I had to resign from my position as an organizer of the Canadian Blog Awards (just not enough hours in the day!) I will still shamelessly whore myself for your votes. I am proud to say that Postcards from the Mothership has once again been nominated for a Best Canadian Family Blog award, and I will milk it for all it’s worth!

Best Family Blog nominee

You can vote any day this week, but you can vote only once per category so choose well, as there are several excellent blogs nominated. Don’t make me beg. Well, you’re right, I’ll likely beg anyway. But don’t let that stop you! VOTE!

Canadian Blog Awards now open for nominations!

Hey all! It’s that time of year again. The Canadian Blog Awards are now accepting nominations of your favourite blogs and bloggers.

Once again this year, I’ve been honoured with the task of helping Northern BC Dipper and SaskBoy administer the awards. Some fun stats from last year: In 2007, more than 700 blogs were nominated in 28 categories, and more than 45,000 votes were cast — an impressive number, considering only one vote per IP address per round was permitted. And did you see some of the great videos they put up to announce the winners? (I can’t decide if my favourite was Jack Layton, the bobble-head doll or the talking ball of yarn.) I was at the end of my pregnancy and totally bailed on the end of the competition, but the organizers did a fantastic job in making the awards presentation fun and funny in a lot of the categories.

I’d love to see even more great blogs nominated this year, so don’t be shy. You have until November 22 to make your nominations!

Canadian Blog Awards 2008 – the call for volunteers

Once again this year, I’ve volunteered to help organize and run the Canadian Blog Awards, along with Saskboy and NBCDipper. We’ll be taking nominations starting in the next month or so, but we need a few extra hands to help out with jobs big and small. If you’d like to get involved, drop me an e-mail (danicanada at gmail dot com) or leave a comment here or at the CBA site.

More to follow!

In which I inform the world about snack foods

There is no end to the things I’ve learned through blog. Like, how to parse PHP and SQL on the fly. And also, why slings are better than baby bjorns and some great places to shop online. And about a thousand other things.

In return, I try hard to send quality information out into the Interwebs. Say, for example, you need to know “What are cheesies?” Turns out blog is the number one search return. Yeah, baby. Educating the universe about snack food, that’s my higher purpose.

(I still can’t believe “cheesies” isn’t a universal term. “Cheese puffs” just doesn’t cut it.)

Used to be weight watchers and tim hortons, but I’ve been dethroned on that one. I think I’ll keep my cheesie crown.

(Speaking of cheesies, I’ve been thinking of dredging my archives for fodder. That post is a fun place to start: Buttertarts, cheesies and poutine.)