Here is the great product that the great folks at All Modern are allowing me to give away! (Remember to check out the great dining room furniture at another of the online stores (Dining Rooms Direct) that is part of the CSN Store collection of web stores. See my favorite here!)
For all you wine-lovers, this will be an awesome addition to your wine cabinet! It's a set of a decanting pourer (left) and a vacuum stopper (right)!! I am not a huge wine-o, but from what I do know, decanting your wine will allow the flavors to all mix around together and therefore enhance the taste of your wine. (Also if you have sediment at the bottom of your wine bottle, it will make the sediment stay out of your glass- bonus! You don't have to eat your wine anymore!) AND, the vacuum stopper (which I probably need more than the pourer) enables your wine to stay fresh for longer after you open the bottle! That is particularly desired in households (like mine) where only one person likes wine (me), and on normal occasions I don't drink a bottle of wine by myself in one sitting ;-) Ha!!!
So here is the deal :) To enter, leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite Christmas tradition! I will take comments until
I'll randomly pick a winner (or I'll get Mr. A to help me), and then I'll announce it Wednesday! Then the winner will need to email their address info, then I will pass that along to my contact, and then it will be shipped to you! Enough "then"'s for you? Haha :)
I will start off the Christmas tradition list with three of my favorites:
1. For the last three years, my sisters and I have met at an outlet mall in early December to go Christmas shopping!
2. Mr. A's family goes to church together the evening of Christmas Eve, eats a big dinner, and then we all watch "A Christmas Story" together and inevitably all fall asleep in the living room...
3. We tease my mom endlessly about the hassle of this tradition, but it is a neat one- each Christmas (or Thanksgiving, now that we alternate being with them) at the big meal, she goes around with a bowl of honey and traces a Cross of honey on our foreheads to remind us of all our sweet blessings from God. Of course everyone ends up with honey dripping down their head and then you wipe your forehead and forget that honey was there, and so now you have honey all over your hands and your forehead, but it has been in her family for many generations, and someday I'll get up the guts to carry it on when we're having our own celebrations!
PS! Tell all your blog friends about the giveaway! Feel free to link here, etc.! The more the merrier, and it will be so fun to read about everyone's traditions!!
PPS. I am extending commenting for this giveaway until 9AM Tuesday morning to give more people time to enter!
PPPS. Need some bar stools to shimmy up to your home bar?
12 comments:
how fun! here's one we've started... every year while we're putting up our tree, we watch the movie Elf. we're planning on continuing this when we have kiddos!
OH awesome!
Growing up there were never presents under the tree because one of us always believed in Santa (13 year gap between the oldest in the family and the youngest). So, all the presents were brought up from the basement at midnight after everyone was asleep. Well, I'm 30 now so it's long after everyone found out about Santa and we still bring the presents up at midnight and open our stocking stuffers. Family tradition!
Close second is decorating sugar cookies as a family.
DH and I head back to MN and, before Christmas, make something crafty with my mom. One year it was candle hurricanes with tiles, the next it was beaded snowflakes, and last year we made wine charms. It's a great way to get DH more involved in my fam since we live so far away.
I love the honey cross tradition. So sweet and also sounds like it'd be pretty funny watching everyone else forget they have honey of their faces. LOL!
Even thought I tend to be a big scrooge, my favorite tradition is the one we celebrate on Xmas eve. My mom makes an amazing prime rib dinner. Its usually my immeadiate family and my husbands all together. We eat, watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and then open only one gift (which always 'happens' to be pajamas for Xmas morning.) It's def something I'll continue with my own kiddos one day.
Oh I love the honey tradition :) Aside from shopping with sisters...Mine may have to be going to Midnight Mass! So beautiful and sleepy!
Very cool! I like your Christmas traditions!
One of our traditions is to watch Scrooged; you know - the one with Bill Murray. It makes me laugh & cry every single time.
fun idea!
1. When we were growing up, Santa
left gifts out unwrapped so our parents would make us wait to go downstairs. They would go down first, start a fire, and get the camera ready. They used to take so long, each year putting a bit more off until Christmas am and we would sit at the stairs, the 4 of us, begging to come down while they inevitably were assembling some bicycle. Or at least it felt like that :)
2. Now that we are grown we all meet at the sister's house on the 23rd or 24th each year (since she has 2 ovens) and we bake like mad-mostly cookies but also fudge, and poppyseed loaves to give away to neighbors and friends. We bake all day, usually burning some, eat most, and definitely going to the store half a dozen times for ingredients we forgot (or sending the unwilling hubbies who otherwise sit on the tv and laugh at the mess and inefficiency of it all). There are always a lot of laughs and goodtimes.
Well, I love Christmas, so I have to share, but I'd like to withdraw from entry into the contest because I don't really drink wine and the gift would kind of be wasted on me. My family is Polish and they get into the (really really old) Polish traditions in a big way. It's all celebrated on Christmas Eve, and it starts with the youngest child present (whatever age) finding the first star. Then the family reads Luke 2 - all of it - out loud. Then each person gets an oplatek (blessed wafer stamped with a Nativity image) and exchanges a piece of it with everyone else in the family, forgiving each other for the transgressions of the past year. (In my family, a ceremony like this one is definitely necessary.) Then everyone takes a shot of Polish wodka, even the kids (no, I'm not kidding). Then we start the meal - an odd number of courses, up to 13 (we usually did 5 or 7), all white, no meat. Most of the courses were very hard for kids to eat and I actually hate most of the food even as an adult, but I have made my husband suffer through stuffed perch and leniwe pierogi in recent years (in exchange, I make a big Christmas dinner on the 25th with a roast and everything). If we have time, we open presents, and then we go to midnight Mass in Polish, with an hour of koledy (Polish carols) first. Koledy are my absolutely, bar-non favorite thing about Christmas ever, and in rare years when I have heard only American carols (which are also lovely), it just hasn't felt like Christmas to me.
I love the honey!
Every year as kids, we'd sleep one night under the Christmas tree (obviously not on Christmas Eve) in our sleeping bags with a fire in the fireplace and the tree lights lit.
Now that I'm grown, I guess we don't have as many Christmas traditions (probably because we travel almost every year), but we still get up and make egg pancakes (German crepes) after every one has opened their stocking and before the presents. We've always gone to midnight mass the night before, so we've never had to rush off to church and could have a long, lazy morning of opening presents.
I was going to do a post on traditions, but I'll go ahead and share my 2 favorites.
1. When I was little, we had a special memory book that we would gather around on Chrimstas Day and write in it 10 things we were grateful for that year. The book stayed under the tree as our "offering" or our "gift" of gratitude to Jesus. We stopped it when my Dad passed away as it was his thing. When DH&I married, he loved the idea so we started our own book (I have the original too). It has a picture of us on the front and our last name. In addition to the gratitude things, we've added things like which relatives we saw that Christmas, what the food was (we change it every year), what our ornament was for the year, & favorite Christmas moment. There is also a space for 4 pictures for each Christmas.
2. We have a huge nativty under the Christmas tree that once belonged to a church and was given to my dad and now passed down to me. Baby Jesus doesn't get placed in it until we return from Midnight Mass. Not original, but I love it.
Lovely traditions all around!
Mine is that my little brother and I read the book "Santa Calls" on Christmas Eve just before bed. The book is all about a wonderful sibling relationships and a one-of-a-kind Christmas adventure.
This year, I turn 29 and my brother just turned 22. We still read that story every year because it's our own little tradition! :-)
Cool! :-D
My favorite tradition is Christmas Eve. My Dad cooks for us all, and we all have different things we want to eat, so he ends up making a few different meats on the grill. Then we sit around, with candlelight, and reflect on the year. I love it. :-D
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