Holiday Gifts of Love Blog Hop

It's a Happy Holiday from your favorite Authors and Bloggers. While we know everyone celebrates a different way, we wanted to make sure that you guys knew how much we treasure you all. So from Dec 14th to Dec 17th, all 200 or so of us will be blogging about the holidays and what they mean to us. We may talk about our favorite holiday traditions, recipes, gifts, reads, heroes, and so much more. We want to hear about what you do for the holidays, what you read, and who you'll spend it with. We hope to see you here and happy hopping!

And while we do that, we are EACH doing a giveaway. Yep. There will be over 200 giveaways on each blog hosted by that Author or Blogger.

But that's not all....
We have THREE grand prizes. You as a reader can go to EACH blog and comment with your email address and be entered to win. Yep, you can enter over 200 times!

Now what are those prizes?

1st Grand Prize: A Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet

2nd Grand Prize: A $200 Amazon or B&N Gift Card

3rd Grand Prize: A Swag Pack that contains paperbacks, ebooks, 50+ bookmarks, cover flats, magnets, pens, coffee cozies, and more!

This is how I feel on the Holidays. Really.  When I was a kid, the holidays were about family, now I’m not saying I had the most functional family in the world, but it was about getting together with family.  A big meal, seeing relatives and those annoying cousins who got into your room and messed with your stuff.  The tree was real, in fact most times ours was cut in the marsh on the farm.  That lovely smell through the house, except the year of the skunk tree—it was frigid cold outside and we went and got the tree.  Couldn’t smell a thing it was so cold.

Until the tree thawed out in the living room, then it became pungently clear that a skunk had sprayed the tree.  We still refer to that Holiday tree as Skunk Christmas. Wonder if they’d like to bottle that and make it into candles and plug ins and sprays—somehow I don’t think so.

Every year it comes sooner, this year it came along with Halloween, went to the store to get some bags of candy for Halloween and they had Christmas décor on sale already.  What happened to Thanksgiving?  Time goes fast enough without retail stores hitting the warp speed button.  The giant of commercialism is sitting at the helm waiting for Santa to point his finger and say Enaguge.   Or wait is that a different situation?

It does seem that everything is being pushed by Santa, no more good or bad girls and boys, everyone should get it all under the tree!  Even a new car.  Last year I think I saw one add with a Santa salesman selling cars.  It must have worked because this year it seems every add has a santa hawking a new car in red or white. 

The economy is still harsh, this, I am sure is why retailers are hawking their wares so hard, grabbing for every last bit consumers have to spend. 

This year, we are broke.  Yeah broke.  Am I getting out the plastic?  No.  borrowing from relatives? No. taking out a bank loan? No.  We decided this year that we would spend $10 bucks on each other.  That’s 10 per person, not each person spending 10 on each other person.  We are going to Dollar stores and putting together a fun and silly bunch of gifts,  It’s been a lot of fun hunting the $1 Jungle looking for what the other person might like, and find amusing.

And under the tree all those little gifts look kinda neat with their big bows the cats and the raccoon keep snatching.   This year we are rediscovering the old values that the Holidays held, about family and fun, not the biggest most expensive gifts, not traffic and lines at stores, the closeness of family and friends.

Happy Holidays Everyone From my home and my critters to you and yours!

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