12 Days of Christmas Giveaways Minus 8 Days
December 22, 2008
Last Friday was the final day of The Twelve Days of Giveaway on the Ellen Degeneres Show and can that girl ever give presents! I’m talking Wii Entertainment Systems, Sony Blu-Ray Players, and weekend get-aways. Oh, to be on her Christmas shopping list!
But where Ellen left off Anita picks up by giving away one awesome gift a day for the next four days and yes, that includes Christmas Day! Every morning at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Coast Time I’ll add a post telling you how you can win that day’s giveaway and just how you can win will be different every day so keep coming back to join in the fun.
While Ellen had big money giveaways, the giveaways here will make a difference in the world, at least in one little corner of it, since all the prizes will be coming from Bead for Life, a non-profit organization committed to eradicating poverty in Uganda.
Bead for Life is a socially responsible global organization, working with HIV-positive mothers and refugees from a brutal civil war in Northern Uganda, all of whom were living on less than $1 a day in extreme poverty. Based in North America and Uganda, Bead for Life has partnered with industrious women who make vivid beaded jewelry out of recycled paper.
Bead for Life is doing an incredible work and the beauty and quality of the items made by the women is stunning! To kick off our big 12 Days of Christmas Giveaways Minus 8 Days extravaganza, today one of you will be winning the triple strand swirl necklace to the right in the color selection you choose! Go here to view a larger image.
To participate in today’s gift giveaway answer the following question in a few sentences: What was the best Christmas gift you’ve ever received and why? That would be the best Christmas present after the Christ Child that is! I’m thinking more in the category of mittens and EasyBake Ovens!
T0 play:
- All entries must be submitted to the comment section of this post. Be sure to include your email address in the comment form! No email submissions will be considered.
- Entries must be submitted by this evening at midnight, Pacific Coast Time.
I’ll announce today’s winner at the beginning of tomorrow’s post. I’ll also notify the winner via email, along with requesting their bead color choice and postal mailing information be sent to me in a return email.
Now let’s begin the fun! Good luck!
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E-MAIL SUBSCRIBERS: If you would like to participate in the four days of giveaways you will need to come to the blog at http://www.sisterfriends-together.org each day to submit your entry in the comment section of the post. Do not submit your entry in email. Since the emails are often sent several hours to an entire day after the post has gone up on the blog, don’t wait for your email to arrive before coming to SisterFriends to see how to play each day’s giveaway!
Posted in Contests, Giveaways, and Games
Sweet Hope Cookies
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
This is easy…may not be worth first prize, but it was the best gift. Ever. When I was 10, about two months before Christmas I spotted The Gift. There in our local Sav-On, was a huge teddy bear. No kidding on the huge part. It you stood it up it out it was about 5 feet tall, and so wide it would be impossible for even Michael Phelps to wrap his arms around it. It generally sat in a nice welcoming blob form as if it begged you to come sit with it. I wanted that bear. I needed that bear. As a child, I wanted all bears…I had at least 150 of them by the time I reached teen-hood. I made my need known to the powers that be. And I felt confident the bear would be mine. My parents showed love through gifts so it was a shoe-in.
A few weeks before Christmas on another trip to Sav-On, I noticed the bear was gone from the shelf. I panicked. I hadn’t seen it in my house and I had no idea how you hide a gift that big. Remember, it was huge! And I REALLY needed that bear! I thought for sure someone else had bought it. There was only one in the store. Sad. Very. Sad. So I set my sights on something else, probably a nerf football or Pong, but still held out hope.
And then imagine my glee when I woke up Christmas morning to see that bear next to the tree with a fat bow around its neck, beckoning me to sit in its lap. I was overjoyed. I needed that bear. I needed it because I needed someone big to hold me. Someone that would just sit with me and cover me and protect me. Somehow, that bear represented that for me in such a palpable way. I needed that bear.
Ironically, I recently ran across a home video of that Christmas. I watched me as a little girl run to that bear and cling to it. It was surreal to witness as an adult. I wanted to hold her and tell her everything would be ok. At least she had the bear. It was obviously her best gift…ever.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
The best Christmas present I ever got happened last year. My dear friend Raz gave me the encouragement, challenge, and support to come out. First, she gave me the birthday present of a visit to her house in our hometown (where she’d just moved back to), and then gave me, through the whole Christmas escape, a quiet sanctuary in which to heal and contemplate. Then, she dared to challenge the way she’d watched me live for the past two decades (fifteen years of which we’d not been in touch). And, herself free from much of the fundamentalist rhetoric in which we were both raised and wherein we originally built our friendship, she offered this to me.
Why is this the best gift, so far? My life is so beyond better, freer, more intense spiritually, and overall exponentially more amazing and awe-ful than it was this time last year. I was depressed. I was in a shell. I was bereft of any hope for anything other than the careful cage of being “ex gay.” And now, I am growing in my awareness of how very much God loves me, and how this orientation is God-designed.
I cannot ever thank Raz enough for the amazing gift of friendship, grace, and gentle truth.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 am
The best Christmas gift was when I was addicted to corn chex cereal and tab soda (Amy grant drank it) and my parents bought me 3 boxes of cereal and a six pack of Tab soda that no one else could touch!
I like originality – I was 14/15 at the time.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
The best christmas present was when i was a child and i really wanted this special edition barbie house…and all i gto was a small doll chair and i was sad, but my parents were like it is to go in your babie dream house!
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:47 pm
the best present i ever got was my ipod touch last christmas!!
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
The best Christmas present I ever got? I was sitting in the desert in Saudi Arabia, the year was 1991, I hadn’t had any mail from home for two weeks when my first sargeant walks into the command tent for our morning briefing the day before Christmas carrying a package, hands it to me “here LT, this came for you today”. It was a box from my Dad, filled with beef jerky and a rum fruit cake and three letters from my family. Best thing in the world that I had for Christmas.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
When I was five or six years old, Santa Claus brought me my first bicycle for Christmas. I was so excited to finally get a “big girl” bike! It was beautiful and blue, and it had training wheels, so I knew I would be able to ride it. I couldn’t wait. My dad took me out and put me on the bike on the front porch. From my extensive tricycling experience, I knew how to pedal, so I started going. Unfortunately, no one had told me how to STOP the bike — I went right off the front porch and took a three-foot dive into the azaleas! I recovered and grew to love riding my bike — but my dad never quite lived it down.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 pm
When I was 16 years old, my grandma whom I was more close to than my mom made me a quilt by hand. She told me that every stitch made in the blanket was a prayer she said about me when she was making the quilt. It was blue, my favorite color. She passed away when I was 18. She told me when she was sick, before she passed….everytime you wrap up in this blanket, its me hugging you.
December 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
My best gift was a hamster. It was so totally unexpected because my mom was deathly afraid of anything small and furry that I thought I had no hope of ever having something like that of my very own. I’d asked just one time for a hamster, thinking that it was fruitless, so imagine my total delight when “Nibbles” was running away on her wheel when we got up that morning — and my mom was sitting in the same room with it! I loved that hamster for a long time, and my mom for loving me enough to do something so special for me.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 am
The best gift I ever received was my dad surprising me one Christmas. My parents were no longer together and dad’s girlfriend consumed all his time it seemed to my young mind and heart. He had told me I wouldn’t see him that Christmas day so long ago and he showed up. I jumped up and down, my hero, my “do no wrong” daddy had come to see me. Sure he came to see my siblings too, but in my little world, my daddy had come just for me. I asked Santa and he answered. My daddy was my present and I was just beaming all day long. I hold that memory very dear to my heart because you see on January 7th, just a week and a bit after that special day… my dad was killed on his fishing boat.
He was and always will be, my BEST Christmas present ever!!!!
December 24th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Hey Anita!! I just wanted to take an opportunity to say a warm and merry Christmas to you! You are sincerely a gift that keeps on giving year round and I would be remiss not to tell you how grateful I am for you friend!
Have a blessed holiday with your wife and loved ones!
{HUGS}!!!!
Wendy