‘Tis the season for this blog to start talking about gift ideas and tips for surviving the holidays without blowing your budget or losing your mind. There’s a lot of great stuff already lurking in the gift category archives, and we’ll be posting more entries on this subject over the next few weeks.

I see I wrote a post almost a year ago on charitable gift ideas, which is sort of what I planned to talk about today. More specifically, how do you get your kids to embrace charity, in the middle of a season designed to overload their brains with GIMME? My own children are too young to fully grok the notion of . . . well, much of anything about the holidays yet (my 3-year-old just asked me this morning if Santa was a pirate. I guess “Ho ho ho” does sound a lot like “Yo ho ho”), but I’d definitely like to create some traditions that involve all of us thinking about more than just our Amazon wish lists each year. Here’s a few activities I’ve been thinking would be good to do with kids during the holiday season:

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All year long, I clip those little “Box Tops for Education” thingies, and the kids bring them in to their school. I didn’t know it until this school year, but the Box Tops program also has something called “Marketplace,” where certain online stores donate a percentage of your purchase to the school.  I’m doing a lot of shopping right now ANYWAY, so this is a nice way to help the school without having to volunteer to help out at the Winter Fair (*shudder*). Plus, as it turned out, it was an excuse to do a little giveaway, and I really like doing giveaways.
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I’ve been listening to my iPod on shuffle recently and it’s been unexpectedly enjoyable — I keep hearing music I haven’t played in years, and as I drive to and from work I drift in and out of these nostalgic fugues. Music can make you remember a certain moment or time period in such a visceral way, don’t you think? Like how a certain smell will bring you back to a specific moment more intensely that your memory alone ever could.

Here are some albums that are both meaningful to me and awesome, in case you’re looking for new (well, old, but you know) tunes. I’m hoping you’ll tell me your memory-triggering albums/songs, too.
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It’s hard to buy a good gift for someone who, say, lives in a nursing home.  They don’t have room for more clutter, and if they won’t tell you what they really need (”Oh, honey!  You don’t need to get me anything!  Save your money!”), how are you going to give them something they’d really enjoy, something that won’t be a burden?

How about this sweet little L. L. Bean tree?  It’s real balsam branches, but only 18 inches high.  It can be put on a side table to make the whole room smell and look wonderful and Christmassy, but then it can be, um, tossed out afterwards.  It’s less than the cost of most flower arrangements, and it’ll last longer.
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My co-blogger here at Milk & Cookies just wrote a post about favorite places to do online shopping, and today’s post is related: what are your favorite shopping blogs or product review sites? Places you go to find gift ideas — either for other people or, you know, for YOURSELF? 

I love shopping/review blogs (so much so that I ran my own until recently); here’s a list of some of my faves, as well as some new-to-me picks recommended by other folks:
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So. November. About seven weeks left until the winter holidays. TIME TO PANIC.

Or for those of us who lovvvvve gift-buying, time to YAY! Time to start spending time every day prowling around looking for deals. Time to start placing orders and squirreling them away, and forgetting what’s already there, and ending up with too much for some people and not enough for others! Yay!

And this means I only have about seven Tuesdays left to share gift ideas and great finds with you, and
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