No present, yet? Running out of time? Have you procrastinated and are now in a bind? Pulse rate up and heart beating fast? Geez… scrambling to find gifts at the very last minute can be stressful and downright pathetic. Relax. Don’t lose your cool. Here are a variety of quick gift ideas that are guaranteed to please:
Gift Certificates: Gift certificates are the ultimate life saver. They’re quick and easy to buy and come in any denomination. Most retailers offer gift certificates or gift cards. Also think spas, beauty salons, gas stations, country clubs, gyms, restaurants, etc.
Flowers: Well, flowers may not be original, but they are always welcomed. Stop by your local florist to pick up a wonderful bouquet of roses of assorted wild flowers. Other places to try are supermarkets, corner peddlers and mass merchandisers such as Wal-Mart and Target. Or go online. All the major wire services (i.e. FTD and Teleflora) have Web sites that you can order directly from.
Bottle of Wine or Liquor: If you need a gift in a hurry, pick up a bottle of fine wine or liquor. Agency liquor stores usually carry gift bags that are specially made for bottles. Many also carry a small selection of greeting cards and other possible gift alternatives such as sparkling cider. You can complete your gifting needs in one quick stop.
Bath and
Body Gift Set: A bath and body gift set is a great present for your mom, girlfriend, sister, niece, etc. Stop by your local pharmacy, gift shop or fine department store for a delightful selection of personal care gift sets.
Stuffed Animal: For a child or for someone that you love, a stuffed animal is a perfect last minute gift. You can find them almost anywhere – from gift shops to convenience stores.
Cash: Now here’s a gift that we can all use. Cash! Just put a little in a card or wrap some up. With money, they can always buy or put it towards what they really want.
Passes to a Local Attraction: Stop by and pick them up tickets for admission to a local amusement park or museum. Get creative in your giving. Put the tickets in an unusual box or container and present them to the recipient with a smile.
You’re down to the wire or just learned that a gift is expected. What do you do? No, you don’t start pacing and chewing your fingernails off. Just opt for one of the quick gift ideas above and you’re good to go. Breathe… one, two, three.
© 2005, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Need more great gift ideas for a variety of people and occasions? Visit The Home Gift Shopper at http://www.homegiftshopper.com – And don’t miss our new, full article RSS feed!
Consider a fresh approach. Don’t send flowers. Firstly, they are very expensive during Valentine’s Day. Secondly they’ll die. Instead, why not get her a living plant? Roses symbolize love. Red and white roses signify unity. Plants that give off fragrances such as lavender and violets will be appreciated by your loved ones too.
Rekindle your love by reminiscing the past. You don’t just have happy memories only. Visit your old haunts where you first had your intimate moments like the first embrace, first kiss, first walk or the first outing together.
I think these are great ideas because both of you can do it together. Why not go for cooking classes together? Then both of you can cook for each other and comment on each other’s cooking. If you are interested in the arts, consider learning to play a new musical instrument together or enroll for a dance course together?
You can rent some romantic movie classics like Titanic, Ghost, Pretty Woman, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and 4 Weddings and a Funeral. These movies are sure to bring out the tenderness in both of you. If your partner likes reading books, you can get your hands on romantic novels like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCollough.
Your partner would appreciate originality and freshness in your ideas. You could compile your own list of favorite love songs on a CD for your loved ones. Here are some
of my suggestions.You can pick songs from the above movies like Pretty Woman and 4 Weddings and a Funeral.Here are some of my all time favorites -Love Me Tender by Elvis, I’ll Be There by Mariah Carey, My Heart Will Go On by Celin Dion, I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers and Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx.
Writing a love letter to the one you cherish is another great idea. Write the letter when you are in a good mood. Give yourself some time to think about what you want to say. Write in a creative, fun and positive manner. Express sincerely your feelings and thoughts.
Affirm your love for your loved one by showing her support. Show your concern and thoughtfulness and initiative by seeing what area of her life needs help and attention. You could volunteer to spend some time doing her groceries or accompany her when she does her shopping.
If both of you love nature, spend some intimate moments by the seaside, mountain, park or a garden. In a relaxed environment far away from the hustle and bustle of the city and work, the beauty of nature takes away your breath and sets you in the mood for love and romance.
You can find lovely gifts and ideas on what to give for Valentine’s Day at http://www.mylovelyvalentine.com
Everybody knows this one. That nasty burning feeling in your throat after you unwisely devour just one more helping of Grandma Betty’s double layer praline pumpkin chiffon pie. Indigestion is what most people know as heartburn. Burping, bloating and excess gas are all typical and socially challenging symptoms of common indigestion. And the holidays are challenging enough.
Don’t think you have to avoid the festive gatherings of friends and family. Simply eat early, eat less, and stay away from foods that are the culprits of your discomfort. A fiber-rich diet that includes soluble and insoluble fibers like vegetables, legumes and whole grains is a mainstay for subduing holiday overeating.
Including high fiber foods, not only during your holiday meals but in your everyday menus, is your strongest bet for conquering digestive ills and maintaining good health. Fiber not only reduces your risk for certain diseases and conditions such as high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and colon cancer, but your body is better able to detoxify all that you dump into it. There is less stress on your immune system.
Fiber’s greatest (and longest, if you are measuring your colon) benefit is assisting your 30-foot digestive system in improving its speed and efficiency. By speeding up the digestive process, constipation becomes a word less uttered. Naturally, sticking to a high fiber diet has many more substantial health benefits.
For starters, high fiber foods soak up fats. You eliminate most
fiber without it being totally digested or absorbed into your bloodstream. That means no calories. Your high fiber meal soaks up water like a sponge and gives you that “full” feeling. While your intestines roll merrily along, the soluble fiber is truly curbing your appetite as your stomach slows down its emptying time. Your digestive system has more needed time to absorb the good nutrients from the fiber-rich food you just ate.
Fiber also binds with some carbohydrates to slow down their rate of absorption and digestion. If you suffer much from mood and energy swings, a high fiber diet around the holidays will keep your blood sugar level more balanced. This might just help you tolerate listening to Uncle Harry’s fishing stories again this season.
The continuous debate and analysis about nutritional guidelines rings clearly like Santa’s sleigh bells all year long. But there remains one very important factor that everyone knows to be crucial to overall health. Fiber. We need to include more high fiber foods on our plate.
Try to monitor how much you stuff into your mouth this holiday season. The only thing that should be stuffed is the stocking hanging from the mantelpiece.
Stephanie Shank (a.k.a. Fiberlady) has studied good nutrition since her days of mothering began 15 years ago which prompted her commitment to a high fiber lifestyle and the development of her informative website High Fiber Health.
Do you have feelings that you didn’t do something as well as you would have liked this year? With the intention to solve this by the end of the year? Many of us desire to begin the new year in a new light in our relationships. The ultimate motive, however, is that we don’t want to drag our emotional baggage into the coming year.
Having Thanksgiving in November and Christmas in December all leading to the beginning of new promises in the next year isn’t a fluke. The emotional need for love and peace is set in our emotional DNA and expands during this period. Gift giving is normally the result of wanting to give something that relieves the guilt of something. All for the promise of starting the New Year with a clean slate.
Your motive during the holiday period depends on your beliefs. Yet, it is a time to reconnect with love. Love is the greatest need for all of us. It is the foundation for our need for respect, honor, and interaction. We need love as proven in studies on newborns — those touched and loved during their first few weeks and those that aren’t. Our love for our family, friends, but mostly with ourselves, is a strong desire that is manipulated by retailers during this period. Yes, I honor the fact that it has made the United States a great nation because of it but have we ever thought of how life could be different if we met it in another way?
There are other ways to balance the holiday season, this season and for the rest of your life. Examine why you are purchasing gifts. Is it the need to feel more loved? Is it to relieve the guilt
so you can begin the New Year with a clean slate — or at least a cleaner slate? What is driving the guilt? Not enough time spent with who? What are you working towards shedding before the New Year enters?
I am sharing this with you because I know of other ways and their results are greater than anything a gift will ever solve. It begins with forgiveness and transfers into living a different way of life — all year long. That’s 24/7, Monday-Sunday, with everyone in your life currently, from the past, and in the future that touch your life.
The message is to live a life of love, light all year long. Imagine a life of being guilt-free and being in a state of love and peace with yourself and others. No judgment with yourself. No judgment of others. Is it possible? I say yes and I know you know it as well. There are people living it. You have already experienced parts of it. Begin with the choice today. Not tomorrow, not as a New Year resolution. But today. Now. This minute. This second. Live the next hour guilt-free. Then the next hour. Live each hour whenever you can think of this process. Let the hours merge together and eventually your life changes dramatically and whole world that you touch shifts around you. You know its possible. It begins with a choice and shifts with awareness and the smallest of commitments.
(c) Copyright 2005, Catherine Franz. All rights reserved.
Catherine Franz, business and writing coach, resides in Virginia and is a syndicated columnist, radio producer, International speaker, and author. Ezines and otherarticles: http://www.abundancecenter.com http://abundance.blogs.com
The holiday season is a time for reflection, taking inventory, giving remembrance and thanks for all that has been good in our lives over the past year. It is also a time for forgiveness, mercy and generosity. In these times, we surely need all of those things; for this has been the year of the liar.
This is the year of the liar not because we have become particularly proficient liars or because we lie so much more than we have in the past. It deserves this designation because never before have we been so proud of our lies and willing to publicly adore the lying of others.
We have always been liars. Sure, some lies seem innocent enough. The lie about whether or not your wife looks fat in that dress has good intentions. It is told to avoid conflict (heaven knows nobody really wants that) and to avoid hurting your wife’s feelings. The thing is that unless your wife is blind, she knows whether or not she looks fat in the dress and what she is looking for is affirmation from you. She needs to have enough ego integrity to ask for what she wants. Backdoor communication isn’t healthy for anyone. If you lie, then when can she trust you? Can she trust you on the “big stuff”? Well, if you don’t have the courage to tell the truth on the “little” stuff; where will this sudden burst of courage come from? If by chance, your wife really wants a second opinion on whether or not she looks fat in that dress, an opportunity for exercising the strength of partnership bonds has just leaped haplessly to its death.
We tell these kinds of lies because from childhood we are taught that lying is bad but some lying is okay. Not only is some lying okay, it’s laudable and fun. Y’all remember Santa Claus don’t you? I know I am going to loose some of you here because of nit picking but here we go…
Santa Claus is a jolly fat man who spends 364 days spying on everybody all over the world keeping J. Edgar Hoover style files on all of us. Then, we get pigeon holed into the “good boys and girls” or “bad boys and girls” cliché. The “good” boys and girls get their hopes and dreams fulfilled in a box with pretty papers and ribbons. The “bad” boys and girls get nothing or a lump of coal depending on the disposition of the mythology disseminator. (In these days of scarce fossil fuels, I’m saying a lump of coal is a fairy tale.)
Given the nature of the season, it seems appropriate to ponder this statement, “…He who among you is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” This statement is an acknowledgement that we are not creatures that are absolute in nature. None of us is all good or all bad that we may be so easily categorized. That includes Santa himself. You could hardly call him supportive when they wouldn’t let Rudolph play reindeer games. Suddenly, a little fog comes in and it’s, “Rudolph! Buddy! How’s it going?”
Too often we underestimate the ability of children to understand the shades of gray in life. Children are capable of understanding that both burglary and murder are bad but they are not equivalent. Children are capable of understanding that even good
people do bad things sometimes and that even bad people are capable of doing good things. This type of thinking leads to the tendency to oversimplify and make sweeping and inaccurate generalizations like… “The axis of evil” and “they hate us for our freedom.”
Consider the recently executed Stanley “Tookie” Williams. He committed horrible acts of violence and cruelty, distinctly bad things. He also committed acts of kindness and thoughtfulness through his humanitarian efforts toward eradicating violence. There is no objective balance sheet of good and bad. Good deeds do not cancel out bad behavior nor does bad behavior negate good acts.
We reward Bill Gates everyday at an alarming rate with our purchasing dollars for the lies he told (by his own account) to initially fund Microsoft. He isn’t alone. The list of lying CEO’s is too numerous and depressing to list. Lying may not begin with the Santa Claus thing but few other lies are more pervasive and universally accepted, no, applauded. Maybe that is my own denial showing because even as I write these words an unfortunate list of culturally pervasive lies has occurred to me. Perhaps what is true is that it is the first in a long line of culturally accepted lies that we encounter over a lifetime.
Some adults will still say, “What’s the harm?” They will accuse those who are unwilling to participate in this fiction of being fanatically histrionic or worse of being a “scrooge”. They see this as a harmless romp that brings joy to lives of children. I tell you now that this is equivalent to the oft-reprised refrain of “boys will be boys” that excuses uncalled for and uncivilized behavior in boys/men. It is no less thoughtless and destructive.
I wonder annually how many children are afraid that Santa won’t come because they don’t have a chimney? How many children are concerned that Santa won’t leave any presents because he can’t find them as they are being shuffled between divorced parents when Christmas comes? There are a myriad of questions that this little white lie leaves in its wake along with a myriad of follow-up lies.
Worse still is what the bourgeois failed to even consider as this lie blanketed our cultural psyche; the failure of Santa to visit the children of the underclass and others whose disposable income will not afford gifts at all. We know that we are what we think. We often think what others tell us about ourselves and nobody is more vulnerable to the esteem of others than children. What does the Santa story say to these children? Everyone who is good gets presents. If you didn’t get any presents you must be bad. Let the self-fulfilling prophecy begin.
In short, (I know it’s a little late for that) we can surely find a way to tell our children fanciful tales so that they can enjoy them but still understand them for what they are. Now that we’ve had this talk, who’s gonna tell George about Santa?
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Bunnies & chicks, colourful eggs, and the hunt for hidden chocolate. It’s no wonder kids await the arrival of Easter with such eager anticipation. While many families have their own private rituals to celebrate this springtime holiday, this year consider throwing an Easter party for friends and family. Wondering how? Just follow these tips for foolproof egg hunts, crafts and races to entertain your guests, and tasty treats to entice your tireless hunters to the table. This party plan is sure to please.
The Hunt
The egg hunt is the highlight of most Easter parties. However, how do you ensure even the smallest hunters get their fair share of the eggs? Here are some time-tested tips:
• Put the participants’ names on the eggs in advance, and/or assign a colour to each child, if using plastic eggs.
• Assign different search areas based on age. Smaller children’s eggs might be in plain view, while others are harder to find.
Looking to add a twist? Here are some variations on the traditional hunt:
• Instead of chocolate eggs, use jellybeans to add difficulty.
• Use hollow plastic eggs, each with a small treat such as a candy, temporary tattoo, a few coins, or even a clue to a larger prize.
• Working alone or in teams, each solves clues leading to other clues, and eventually to the Easter treats. Have different clue trails for each child or team.
• Have the kids hide the eggs and make the parents look for them
Activities
Keep the excitement going after the hunt by trying out some of these games:
• Egg Bowling. Using colored hard-boiled eggs and one white, roll the white one onto the lawn or rug, and see who can roll their coloured egg the closest.
• An “Egg-citing” Obstacle Course. A variation of the egg & spoon race, teams navigate their way around and through various obstacles without dropping their eggs. If an egg drops off your spoon, you can start again, or do an agreed upon penalty, such as five jumping jacks or singing a silly song.
• Egg Roll. Using only their noses, people must roll an egg across the finish line, five to ten feet away. This also makes a good relay.
Food
By now, your little guests will no doubt be ready for a snack. In addition to any other delicious treats you plan, let them decorate an Easter Basket Cupcake. Here’s how:
You’ll need:
• cupcakes (one per person, but a few extra are a good
idea)
• your favourite homemade or prepared frosting
• shredded coconut (preferably green or yellow)
• colourful jellybeans
• pipe cleaners (one per cupcake)
• plastic knives
Using a plastic knife, have the kids frost the top of their cupcakes. Next sprinkle coconut around the outside edges of the cupcake, leaving the middle clear. Then, place several jellybeans in the middle. Finally, bend pipe cleaners into U-shapes, and poke the ends into the cupcakes to form basket’s handles. Enjoy!
Easter Egg Art
Then, with only a few inexpensive craft supplies from the store or around your house, give a twist on the traditional colouring of eggs with these ideas:
• Marbleized Eggs. Add 1-tablespoon of vegetable oil to your egg dye. Lightly stir and immediately dip your egg into the liquid and remove. Let dry and repeat the process with another colour for interesting effects.
• Egg Animals. Go beyond dipping and dyeing by creating colourful critters out of your eggs. Use craft supplies to create pipe cleaners legs and horns, pom-pom noses, paper ears, googlie-eyes, feathers and more. Markers also work well. White glue or a low-temperature glue gun works well with some supervision. Themes might include barnyard animals, creatures from outer space, or even family members. Have a contest and take lots of pictures.
• Eggshell Mosaics. Need a use for those cracked or broken coloured eggs from your relays? Break up the eggshells into pieces that are small enough to lie flat, but not so small they are hard to handle. Sort into piles by colour. On a thin piece of cardboard, draw a simple design with a dark pen or marker. Spread a thin coat of white glue onto part of the design, and fill it in with eggshell pieces. Continue until the design is complete. Try not to cover up your outline. Let it dry overnight and enjoy.
Whether you decide to entertain just your family, your friends, or invite the entire neighbourhood, everyone is sure to enjoy themselves at your “egg-stra” special Easter party.
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Award-winning educator, speaker and author Rob Stringer coaches parents with his upbeat approach to learning and parenting. Explore articles, activities and learn how to create the family you desire.
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Years of having to make do have turned me into a…”There must be someway I can do this cheaper type person.”
My old new house needs total make over. We are thinking about moving into my MIL’s house. So I am walking around looking and thinking, my goodness, this will be way too much to do and then the old, “There must be someway I can do this cheaper type person” kicks in and I think, yah, there must.
First curtains need to be put up on the windows. I will check all of Grandma’s fabric…and she has tons, and see if some of it can be salvaged for window treatments. Gee, today all you really need is a nice wooden Venetian blind and a swag or scarf.
I am thinking about sticking with the umbers I see outside this time of year (November). I already bought my border for the kitchen at a B&B we went to a couple of weeks ago, and it kind of has a sultry tone to it. You can do the same thing with fabric. Just take a quick trip to Wal-mart’s fabric Dept. They are always getting rid of material at bargain prices. If you are doing a dining room for Thanksgiving, do swags/scarf for the windows and a table cloth, placemats and napkins.
It really wouldn’t take as long as you think. Put up some lace curtains and make a scarf from the fabric you use for your table cloth..or maybe you have a plain white table cloth already available. Just make a runner that matches your window scarves,napkins and placemats.
Now what about the centerpiece? I like this idea on about.com Just has some greens and Fall
leaves, candles…well, take a look: The Centerpiece, It’s one where you can just remove the fall leaves and replace with berries for Christmas. Saving time is what it’s all about. Put up some wreaths on the doors and over the mantle. A simple grape vine with dried flowers in fall tones is nice. Use some wire ribbon to make a bow.
Put up plain candlesticks with fall colored candles and don’t forget the whole theme of Thanksgiving is giving thanks for our bounty. Use displays of fruit and gourds, pumpkins and mums. Get out an old watering can and fill it with leaves to place on the porch, any old galvanized buckets? Put wheat or tall dried grass display in your bucket. Don’t forget the grapes. Take a nice glass pedestal compote and cascade different varieties.
If you have a garden, pile the day’s garden harvest into a wheel barrow at the back door.
Just remember …you don’t have to use all these ideas. You don’t want to have to take all this down to prepare for Christmas that’s just around the corner.
Complete Thanksgiving Menu and Recipes by Lorrie Ann DannerCopyright 2004 Caroline Shaw
Caroline Shaw holds a B.S. degree from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA in Secondary Education, English. She is a mom to six children. She is Editor and Publisher of the Online Magazine,”A Mom’s Love.” Each issue contains informative articles for WAHMs, their children, single moms, working moms, and more. She lives with her husband, three “still at home” children, a collie, an australian shepherd and two kitties in Western Pennsylvania. Her hobbies are writing, cooking, gardening, decorating and crafts. Visit AMomsLove.com
1. Knowledge is Power. Whatever the area of collecting – depression glass, blue and white pottery, silver, paperweights, toys or furniture of any period – there is a book to arm any collector for his or her next antiquing adventure. Look for pocket guides to slip in handbags during shopping excursions or more complete reference books for curling up by the fire. Prices start at $9.95.
2. Toys for Boys. A 1935 Dusenberg under the Christmas tree is sure to bring a smile to the face of any car enthusiast, even if it is a die-cast metal reproduction. These are popular for boys of all ages, as a desk objet for men or as bedroom décor for young boys. Prices start at $40.
3. Christmas Ornaments. An exquisite hand blown Christmas ornament becomes a keepsake gift. Beautiful reproductions and charming vintage ornaments are equally well received. Prices start at $8.
4. Knock. Knock. Attractive reproduction brass doorknockers crafted in Italy add elegance to any entrance. With styles to suit Arts & Crafts to Georgian to contemporary homes, there is one to complement any
home. Prices start at $30.
5. Homemade Hostess Gifts. Antique stores are treasure troves of small dishes, teacups and plates in glass, ceramic or silver. All at affordable prices. Fill one up with your favourite candies, chocolates or home baking, wrap it in tissue paper, tie it with a bow and you have a one-of-a-kind homemade hostess gift. Prices starting at $4.
6. Wrap It Up. Vintage napkins, tea towels, crocheted doilies can take the place of wrapping paper for small gifts. Secured with a pretty ribbon, they are sure to delight anyone. Prices starting at $3.
7. Hook It on a Handbag Caddy. Ladies will love this hook designed to keep their handbags off the floor. It’s a new and improved version of a style from days gone by. And it keeps pickpockets at bay, so ladies can enjoy a stress-free meal. Price is $34.50.
Martin Swinton owns Take-A-Boo Emporium located in Toronto, Canada. He does furniture restoration; caning and rushing repairs; appraisals and has teaches courses on antiques. Martin can be reached at http://www.takeaboo.com
This time of the year is supposed to be happy. A time when family is warm and welcoming. A time for loving and feeling loved.
We watch the annual TV specials which emotionally choke us up. We watch those traditional, mushy movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life which bring sentimental tears to our eyes. We watch those heartwrenching Hallmark commercials which make us sob dramatically. All of these portray the ideal and they always end happily.
But real life isn’t like that.
Watching and listening to all the hype and sweetness reminds many of us of our losses. We think of the things we won’t have this year, or any year ever again. The holiday season is
actually the season of much depression and sadness. Just imagine for a moment how many losses a person of 70, 80 or 90 may have endured.
To help us understand those losses, here is a partial list.
- Hair
- Energy
- Parents
- Taut skin
- Hearing
- Stamina
- Career
- Muscle
- Eyesight
- Mobility
- Attendance at house of worship
- Hobbies
- Figure
- Friends
- Car
- Siblings
- Independence
- Spouse
- Finances
- Choice
- Lifelong collections
- Personal belongings
- Purpose
- Home
If the depression persists into the new year, get help from a mental health clinic. To voice the losses and the feelings can sometimes release them. Spend some time with elders this season and listen to their stories.
About The Author
Linda LaPointe, MRA is an ElderLife Matters coach and author of several products to assist families experiencing aging including the pamphlet, Don’t Be a Burden: 100 Tips. Get free articles and information at www.SOSpueblo.com.
Christmas shopping online is not for you? If you are one of those that share this thought, you probably like to enjoy the atmosphere of physical shopping. Doing your Christmas shopping online despite all its convenience, lack the festive mood. The convenience of online shopping has reduced the shopping experience to a browse and click mode, no mood and very little atmosphere.
So, you might think that despite the staggering numbers that shows how many people are actually doing their Christmas shopping online, they are just a minority out of the entire Christmas shopping population. Well, while I do not have the statistics to back this up –this thinking is likely to be true
To ascertain the fact that the Christmas shopping online folks are really a sub-set of the Christmas shopping crowd, just visit Marcy’s, Barnes and Noble or one of the large departmental stores during the pre-Christmas period, and the crowd you see would highlight the fact that a very large proportion of shoppers are still doing their shopping offline.
And of course, it is this crowd that give rise to the Christmassy feelings. Never mind that you have to wait an hour to find a parking lot or half an hour to pay for your purchases, this feeling enhanced by the jingles that flood the stores is something that doing your Christmas shopping online would never be able to offer.
Having said so much about the value of shopping physically, are there any merits to doing your Christmas shopping online? Yes, from my own experience there are at least two major contributions that doing your Christmas shopping online can provide.
First, Christmas shopping online eliminates the hassle of browsing and deciding at absolutely ground zero on the spot. Imagine you are doing shopping with only a vague idea of what to buy for whom and your only reference is some scribbling on a post-it note.
Enter online Christmas shopping, and you are able to browse online and zero in on the category of items that you would like to get for your love ones. One of the biggest value of Internet is it
allows you to conduct your research and craft a comprehensive list of items that you would like to get for your love ones. So that, when you are doing it physically, all you have to do is to choose from the different brands and decide on the ones that have the best value. Thus, saving time and allowing you to buy for more people in lesser trips.
The other contribution of online Christmas shopping is that it is able to take care of your ‘bulk purchases’. What I mean is during this festive season of giving and sharing, there would be lots of gifts exchange, and gifts giving to acquaintances.
So, for this group of people, you would probably be getting something that is nice but would not invest too much thought into it, and then you would buy plenty of it to last through the season. Doing your Christmas shopping for these folks online frees out more time for you during those shopping mall trips to choose something special for your love ones. It also takes care of the inconvenience of bringing a lot of stuff yourself (online shopping would have the purchase deliver right to your door steps).
There you have it! Online Christmas shopping allows you to do a thorough research on the gifts to get for your love ones and it also gives you more time in physically shopping for those gifts by allowing you to buy the generic stuff online. So, using technology allows you to enjoy the magic feeling of shopping under the thick Christmas atmosphere provides by shopping malls with lesser things on your mind to worry about.
Having said all these, I hope you folks would integrate (what a word!) online shopping to brighten your overall Christmas shopping experience and enhances the joy and magic buying for those special ones…
Merry Christmas!
About The Author
Ebe is the editor of www.christmasgiftsshopping.com, which provides quality Christmas related links and articles to better the joyous occasion. He reviews and ensures all contributions lead to a fun and easy online shopping experience for Christmas gifts: editor@christmasgiftsshopping.com