Sunday
Dec212008
*TIME’S UP!* Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza Spectacular Spectacle!
Sunday, December 21, 2008 at 9:34AM
Welcome to our first-ever Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza Spectacular Spectacle! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah (or Chanukah, if you prefer)! Make the Yuletide gay!
Whatever you're celebrating, we want to help make your holiday a little brighter.
That's why we're giving away -- in our Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza Spectacular Spectacle -- three fabulous prize packages full of wonderfulness and awesomeness.
Tell them what they can win, Bob!
Bob?
BOB?
Fine, I'll just fill you in myself.
By entering our contest, you'll be eligible to win one of three great prizes.
Prize #1: A Three Irish Girls Sock Kit. This includes your choice of any of our awesome patterns and a skein of yarn in your choice of colorways to complete the pattern! If you are already a sock club member and you have all of our patterns, we'll have a special alternative for you. (Approx. $28 value!)
You know you want a pair of socks like these:
Prize #2: A custom colorway consultation and two skeins of a custom colorway! We can make your colorways dreams come true! On your favorite yarn base! (Approx $50 value!) Exclamation point!
Prize #3: Three months of your choice of club memberships! Sock Yarnista features your choice of two colorways, a custom designed pattern, and a fun extra each month.
If you prefer heavier weight yarns, Stash Menagerie has a broad variety of fibers, your choice of two colorways, and fun extras every few months!
Being a club member also gives you access to exclusive members-only colorways like these:
If you're already a club member, you can extend your membership, add extra skeins to your existing membership, become a member of a club you're not in, or give the membership as a gift to a very lucky person. (Approx $90 value.)
Why are we giving all of this away? For a few reasons. One is the spirit of the holidays. We like brightening people's days a little with a yummy yarn package. It's good to put a little good out there in the world.
Another is to say thank you for all of your support this past year -- you've been with us as we've moved into a new studio, expanded our yarn offerings, and started new clubs. We would be nowhere without our fantastic customers, and we want to say thank you.
Here's how you enter: leave a reply to this post answering the following question: What is your favorite holiday tradition? Do you have a latke party? (And does your house smell like latkes for three weeks afterward?) Do you have a family outing to cut down a Christmas tree? Do you bake something special? Watch something special? Go somewhere special?
If so, I want to hear about it!
Winners will be randomly selected from the responses. You have until Monday, December 22nd at 9pm EST to reply. Winners will be announced Tuesday, December 23rd.
If you'd like to give any of these prizes as a gift, that can certainly be arranged!
Thank you again, dear readers and loyal customers.
Whatever you're celebrating, we want to help make your holiday a little brighter.
That's why we're giving away -- in our Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza Spectacular Spectacle -- three fabulous prize packages full of wonderfulness and awesomeness.
Tell them what they can win, Bob!
Bob?
BOB?
Fine, I'll just fill you in myself.
By entering our contest, you'll be eligible to win one of three great prizes.
Prize #1: A Three Irish Girls Sock Kit. This includes your choice of any of our awesome patterns and a skein of yarn in your choice of colorways to complete the pattern! If you are already a sock club member and you have all of our patterns, we'll have a special alternative for you. (Approx. $28 value!)
You know you want a pair of socks like these:
Prize #2: A custom colorway consultation and two skeins of a custom colorway! We can make your colorways dreams come true! On your favorite yarn base! (Approx $50 value!) Exclamation point!
Prize #3: Three months of your choice of club memberships! Sock Yarnista features your choice of two colorways, a custom designed pattern, and a fun extra each month.
If you prefer heavier weight yarns, Stash Menagerie has a broad variety of fibers, your choice of two colorways, and fun extras every few months!
Being a club member also gives you access to exclusive members-only colorways like these:
If you're already a club member, you can extend your membership, add extra skeins to your existing membership, become a member of a club you're not in, or give the membership as a gift to a very lucky person. (Approx $90 value.)
Why are we giving all of this away? For a few reasons. One is the spirit of the holidays. We like brightening people's days a little with a yummy yarn package. It's good to put a little good out there in the world.
Another is to say thank you for all of your support this past year -- you've been with us as we've moved into a new studio, expanded our yarn offerings, and started new clubs. We would be nowhere without our fantastic customers, and we want to say thank you.
Here's how you enter: leave a reply to this post answering the following question: What is your favorite holiday tradition? Do you have a latke party? (And does your house smell like latkes for three weeks afterward?) Do you have a family outing to cut down a Christmas tree? Do you bake something special? Watch something special? Go somewhere special?
If so, I want to hear about it!
Winners will be randomly selected from the responses. You have until Monday, December 22nd at 9pm EST to reply. Winners will be announced Tuesday, December 23rd.
If you'd like to give any of these prizes as a gift, that can certainly be arranged!
Thank you again, dear readers and loyal customers.
Reader Comments (479)
family! no matter what we do, we do it together. My husband and kids, my parents, siblings, in laws, we are all really close. Most years we draw names for gifts, this year we aren' doing grown up gifts. It's really about the time spent together. We cook, eat, look at lights, watch silly movies. (White Christmas, A Christmas Story, and National Lampoons) we stay up too late, play card games that the inlaws don't get. We decorate the tree with decorations from my childhood that are bent, stained and smashed but still have a place on the tree.
We do a lot, too much, every year, but at the end of it all, it's us. Together.
This will sound strange but our family Christmas tradition is to watch "The Sound of Music" after dinner. I don't remember how this tradition started but last year, after a move, we lost the DVD and Christmas was not the same. So of course, I had to buy the 40th Anniversary DVD edition and now we are back on track.
I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas this year!
My favorite holiday tradition is choosing the Christmas tree and decorating it. We look through all of the trees till we find the one that calls out to us to take it home, then we drag out all the ornaments and talk about where they came from and who got them while we listen to Christmas music. After its all done my husband makes himself some eggnog and we all watch a Christmas movie together.
We don't have a great tradition yet. Our oldest kid just turned 4, so he is really excited about it. So far our tradition is going to family's houses, but we'd like to also have an ornament tradition, and a tradition of having the kids participate in the Giving Tree.
JD
Traditionally, my favorite holiday tradition has been my husbands baking frenzy. Even though we give away 90% of what he bakes, I love what he makes. All of his recipes are decades (some over a century) family recipes that were brought over by his parents and grandparents fleeing Germany during the Hitler years. They are made every winter and offered as gifts for all the various holidays to honor the family that made it out and survived, as well as those who didn't.
But I think my new favorite will be one we started this year. Instead of buying gifts for everyone, we donated the money we would have spent to one charity in the families' names to honor both families. We buy each other gifts that are cost no more than $25 and then send out cards to everyone letting them know which charity we chose in their name. This year it was Heifer International. I have a feeling it's going to be fun to go through and debate which charity we will choose each year. There are many deserving candidates out there, and we've resolved to never choose a charity to which we regularly donate.
Oh - and he still did the baking. But I had more fun choosing the charity.
Happy Holidays to all!
My favourite holiday tradition - well, actually it is two: every Christmas we have a gathering in my stable; we eat cookies and drink "gløgg" surrounded by all of our horses. We go for a ride in sledges, and the kids love this happening. One of my old horses also loves this - cause he knows he will get cookies, he knows the "routine"!
The other one is to pick out the Christmas tree. We have our own "forest" - with trees, and the thing is; we pick out the three we feel no one else would have picked - a crooked not-so-pretty tree, and then; with a little arrangement and so on- we try to make it a beauty! (we have all the oppurtunity to pick a real nice one, but ....everybody deserves a chance, even a tree!)
From Norway: I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!
I am Chinese-American and our Christmas dinners are composed of various Chinese dishes along with the more traditional turkey and trimmings. Growing up, I always wished we could just have what I thought of as the typical American Christmas meal so I could fit in with my other friends. I'm glad I grew out of that narrow-minded attitude and came to understand that every family makes their own traditions. Now, I treasure and look forward to these dinners!
Getting together for a Christmas tea with friends. It started when I was a kid with my mom and some school friends and evolved from there.
We don't celebrate the holidays but when the days are short like this we love to snuggle and watch movies with popcorn or bake and now that my older dd's are knitting we knit together too! :)
Since marrying DH (different culture) and have children (now have 3) I have started some a couple of new traditions. Firstly the children get to choose a new ornament for the Christmas tree. This helps get the ornament stash up, and it makes dressing the tree more special as they remember the ornaments, and who chose them.
And then on Christmas Eve they get to open one present, Christmas pjs :)
holiday question
We love to bake cookies before christmas so we can eat them on christmas eve after church.
Usually they are sugar cookies.
As many others, our tradition started without our realizing it. Each year the kids and I make our own Christmas ornaments, paper chains, popcorn garland, etc. This Christmas-craftaganza has grown so much that we now make our own tree as well! It started with the realization that cutting down a tree to use for a week was such a waste and irresponsible. We had considered purchasing a 'fake' tree but thought more of the three "R's" and remembered the mountain of cardboard boxes stored in our basement. We cut out shapes to fashion a 3-D tree and hang our hand-crafted ornaments on it. We take pictures and when the holidays are over, we dis-assemble the tree, saving the cardboard for the kids to draw on or for projects, etc. We save a small piece of the cardboard for the next year's ornament, where we stick the picture of this year's tree!
In our part of Asia, gift-giving is not part of CHristmas holiday tradition. The tradition I loved most as a kid was having Santa (or Sinterklas, as we call him) come and give out presents (pre-given to him by participating parents).
His helpers, though, the Suartepits (I think it might have come from the German Schwartz Piet, because they're midnight black and scary), I didn't like at all. They bag naughty kids to be sent off to the North Pole.
I'd like my kids to have fond memories of Sinterklas as well, and I'll make sure they'll get their share of Christmas fright from Suartepit too :)
We don't really have any big holiday traditions... my favorite part is just being together, hoping we've found each other the perfect gifts, and celebrating the spirit and meaning of the season.
I absolutely love Boxing Day - all of the men in the family go out to watch football (soccer) and I stay in with my mum and my sister, playing with new toys and chatting. It is still a lovely festival atmosphere but so much more relaxed that Christmas Day itself. We always have homemade chips (fries!) with cold turkey for dinner too!
Well, coming from a family of mostly scandinavian heritage, we follow my old family tradition of using the tree from the previous Christmas as the Good Yule Log to start the following Christmas morning's fire. When the tree has dried (outside after the holiday is over and decorations are off and the birds have used it for shelter from the Nebraska storms all winter) we cut the trunk into several small logs which we store through the sping/summer/fall and, on Christmas Eve after carol's are sung and socks are hung (by the chimney with care) we lay the fire for Christmas morning. Before the children are allowed downstairs, Dad goes down to light the fire and turn on the tree. With wonder and large eyes glowing from the visit of Santa in the night (milk drunk -- cookies eaten -- carrots consumed by Santa and his reindeer of course), the carol's play on the stereo and the wonderful smell of burning pine tree -- last year's beloved Christmas tree and this year's Good Yule Log -- fills the air, our nostrils and our hearts with the joys/smells/memories of Christmases past/present/future.
". . . and I heard him exclain 'er he drove out of sight, 'Happy Christmas to all . . . and to All a Good Night' . . ."
With love and blessings from the plains of Nebraska to the Three Irish Girls.
you wanted to know what our tradition for the holiday season is to go to Midnight Mass and then we all go home to the grandparents house to open our presents.
Christmas Day is spent eating our lavish dinner and being with one another.
what more can you ask of life.
Merry Christmas to You and Your Family. Happy New Year and many, many more to come
Our big holiday celebration is Thanksgiving, and every four years this includes a BIG family reunion. With five kids, eight granddaughters and one grandson (adopted), and four great grandsons (no great granddaughters), and five members of our extended “best friends” family, we stuff us all into our little house for a very big tummy stuffing Thanksgiving meal (three different stuffings, two different cranberry side dishes and three different pies (two of each).) One family comes from Maine, one from NYC, one from California and the rest from the greater Pacific Northwest. Then we are retreat to our various abodes for a calm and relatively casual Christmas/Chanukah holiday with our individual families and the other extended families they each have. At Thanksgiving we only have drum sticks to dispose of, no wrapping paper, no lost batteries, no dry tree needles or broken bulbs. A quiet, small Christmas/Chanukah is relaxing, rejuvenating and happily peaceful, remembering the happy, smiling faces of five kids, eight granddaughters and one grandson (adopted), and four great grandsons (no great granddaughters), and five members of our extended “best friends” family. We love this tradition.
BTW, I am absolutely IN LOVE WITH YOUR YARN!!!
My favorite holiday tradition is chinese food on Christmas eve. Strange for an Irish Catholic family? why yes!!
It started years ago when my dad's aunt dropped by and except for the future christmas dinner there was not much to eat in the house. So dad ordered up some chinese food. The next year she called and asked could we do it again. Twenty years later I think it is the only "tradition" that has stuck with us no matter what state we end up in!!
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanakah, Joyous Kwanza or festivus
Pj
My husband is active duty Navy and I am a hairdresser on the base here in Japan where Christmas is not a holiday. Every Christmas we ask every sailor we come into contact with what they are doing for Christmas, everyone who says they have no plans come to our home to celebrate with us.
My favourite tradition is going to church. I come from a pretty unreligious family, but grew up in an area where church was strong. I have been singing in church choires for years and love to come to church. Especially for christmas where there are so many people they have to stand, where there are so many children, looking so happy, and there is just a very special athmosphere in church on that special day. I was sick last year and couldnt go. Hopefully this year I get to bring my kids to church to enjoy the beautiful music and the special atmosphere.
Merry christmas to all.
We have a nice dinner at my grandparent's house on Christmas Eve followed by opening presents, having a wrapping paper fight, and more eating. Everyone of age sits around the table and enjoys glass after glass of wine, some of which home-brewed from the previous year. Oh, the conversations are grand and it sure does make Christmas morning interesting!
On Christmas Eve just before bed, we sit down in our jammies and read Twas the Night Before Christmas. Then, after we read it, we write in the front cover who read it and the date.
my favorite holiday tradition is where we go to celebrate christmas eve, as we do christmas day with each of our immediate family... i have 4 brothers and 3 sisters, so one of us we "host" the annual christmas eve somewhere "new" each yaer.. with all the grandkids etc bacame too much for our mom (who is no longer with us) so for the past 11 years we have just been taking turns...from who can find the craziest holiday hat to the surprises "dishes" we bring we all love to try new things... it has been quite the tradition to see who can up with the most liked dishof the night!!
oh and usually my cheescake cookies take the prize.. dont ask why. if i dont bake them i cant go :). another sad but true Holiday tradition around here...
We couldn't have kids, so it's just the two of us. For dinner we make a prime rib. We have gifts for the 7 cats &2 dogs. We open presents for everyone and start dinner. We put fake antlers on the great Dane and laugh like crazy. The rest of the day is filled with movies and playing with gifts and the pets, not to mention knitting.