What are your reasons, if any, for not being ready for this Christmas season?

Last year’s Christmas flew by, and I had the greatest hope that this year I would partake in anything Christmas to make it the best ever. However, with school and other responsibilities, Christmas flew by and now next week is Christmas and I am not even ready?! Plus a little snow wouldn’t hurt. What about you? Are you ready for this Christmas, why or why not?

Lake City getting ready for Christmas season

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and all across Coeur d’Alene businesses and residents alike are getting into the holiday spirit. KXLY4′s Jeff Humphrey reports.

Let your Business Have a Rocket Fly During Christmas Season

Christmas — you could imagine more

It comes but once a year. For this precious holiday, we don’t want to lose anything!

YouTube has now become the number one place on the internet to find interesting news clips and videos, and many of us upload our own videos for the world to see.

If you have a company that sells certain products, it’s great to have your sales up during the Christmas Eve. Besides traditional ads, have you ever thought about advertising on YouTube? It

would bring you tens of thousands of customers with the lowest cost!

For individuals, it must be very fun to share some of interesting things on YouTube. Or you can present your best regards to your friends or families just with a video put on YouTube during Christmas. Now, it is time to say hello to the world in this special holiday with YouTube.

The problem is how we can make an attractive video presentation at the lowest cost since we know little about video edit and there is no professional software.

We can use PowerPoint to make the presentation for it has long been a favorite for creating great looking presentations in a easy way.

What it will be if you use both of them?

Are you ready to broadcast your product or just yourself to thousands upon thousands people?

Before you do that, you must be clear about two things:

1. How to download a video from YouTube and embed it into your PowerPoint to make your presentation more attractive?

2. How to upload your PowerPoint to YouTube?

How to download a video from YouTube

It’s very easy. There are many methods for you to choose from, and the easiest way is to use this website:

http://all2convert.com/download-video-youtube.html

You can take any video formats as you want from YouTube.

Then embed the YouTube video to your PowerPoint.

How to upload PowerPoint to YouTube

YouTube accepts only video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the WMV, AVI, MOV, and MPEG file formats. And we all know that our PowerPoint presentations are not in video formats and Microsoft also doesn’t support this conversion. So we need third party software to complete this process, and we don’t want to lose any voice-over, movies, animations and transitions in the PowerPoint after the conversion.

The converted video PowerPoint presentation should play as the original.

Wondershare Video Presenter will make this task a piece of cake! Wondershare Video Presenter is an all-in-one PowerPoint to video converter. It can convert PowerPoint presentations to almost all popular video formats such as MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV, ASF, FLV, MOV, 3GP, 3GP2. Ideal for trade show, digital signature, and in-store displays and ready for video podcast.

Learn more about it!
Wondershare Video Presenter

Are you Using LED Christmas Lights this Holiday Season?

geeks.pirillo.com – http – I’ve had this particular light string on for the past three days. Each of the bulbs is still cool to the touch. It’s also highly energy efficient! If you’re going to string lights inside or outside your house, this is what you need to use. chris.pirillo.com Distributed by Tubemogul.

What gets you ready for the Christmas season?

I love the Advent season in church of the 4 Sunday leading up to Christmas. We started Advent today and the last song was really inspirational “The Advent of our King, our thoughts must now employ; then let us meet him on the road with songs of holy joy!”

I like the songs leading up to Christmas, it gets me ready.

A Happy Gluten Free Christmas for Your Celiac Child: Seven Strategies to Keep the Season Gluten Free

Christmas – especially a gluten free Christmas – takes a lot of planning.

Of course you want your celiac child to enjoy the same treats as everyone else… but sometimes you wonder if that is going to be possible! Mince pies, Christmas cakes, selection boxes and advent calendars… there seems to be gluten in everything! Seven strategies which have helped me enormously in planning a gluten free Christmas for <i>my</i> celiac child. I hope they help you with yours!

1. Plan ahead and spot the danger areas. Go through your family’s Christmas itinerary and work out where a gluten free diet might be compromised. Working through my calendar the other day I remembered that the School Christmas Play is always a mince-pie fest. I need to go prepared with my own gluten free mince pies. Christmas parties need to be planned for, even simple events like a carol service will usually serve mince pies or cookies.

2. Bake in advance and freeze enough individual bags of goodies for each event. I usually take a gluten free mince pie and a gluten free cookie to each event for my celiac son, so I have little bags in the freezer ready to take out on the morning of the event (and because they are safely in the freezer they cannot be eaten ‘by mistake’!)

3. Speak to your child’s school about any Christmas parties or events they might be putting on and how your child will be catered for. You may have to provide your own food, or they might be willing to do that for you if they are very understanding, but have a plate ready laden of food that your child can eat. Even sharing a bowl of gluten free snacks with other children could put the celiac child at risk of contamination by gluten on their fingers. It’s not worth the risk! You may also want to check if they are planning to do any baking around Christmas and talk that through carefully with the class teacher.

4. If you are going away for Christmas, speak to your hosts as soon as possible! Make sure they thoroughly understand the gluten free diet because there is nothing worse than spending every meal wondering if your child will be ill afterward. I often find that people are willing to buy in or cook gluten free food, but often don’t realise the dangers of cross-contamination from say, cutting the gluten free Christmas cake with the same knife as the ‘normal’ Christmas cake. Offer to take some gluten free christmas cookies, gluten free mince pies or a gluten free Christmas cake so you know your child will have enough gluten free food. I hate rationing!

5. Bake lots! Gluten free Christmas food is so expensive if you have to buy it all, and gluten free mince pies cookies and so on are relatively quick and easy to make. You can use your usual recipe with gluten free flour and baking powder, or have a look on my blog for gluten free christmas recipes (see below). A gluten free Christmas cake is a Must, and again, no harder to make than any other cake. If you are reading this, thinking ‘I never bake anything! I buy the lot of it!’ Well, it might be worth spending a Sunday afternoon in the kitchen with the kids! I tend to bake gluten free for the whole family – celiac or not – which means my celiac child feels no different to everyone else.

6. Beware of the hidden gluten in selection boxes and other Christmas candy. I found that selection boxes may be mainly gluten free… but there is just one bar that is forbidden. It’s not worth it! And a bit rough on the child if they have to lose a bar as soon as they open it. I found some big glass storage jars this year, and filled them with candy that I know is gluten free. They look fantastic and really Christmassy with a big red bow on top – and my celiac child will probably still make himself sick… but his I know it won’t be because of gluten!

7. Look for gluten free Christmas dinner alternatives for the whole family. Gluten free turkey stuffing and gravy tastes just as good. If everyone is eating the same, you don’t have to watch your celiac child the whole time, you can just relax. Of course, if you are eating in someone else’s home this is harder, but hopefully you have discussed it with them carefully beforehand and your child also knows what he/she can and can’t eat.

Have a fantastic gluten free Christmas!

Organizing Your Home for the Christmas Season

The holiday season is swiftly approaching, bringing with it great fun and family events. As you are preparing for this great season, it is important to plan accordingly. The friends and family you invite into your home bring plenty of warmth and cheer, but can also create quite a mess. For this reason, organizing your home for the Christmas season is very important, to anyone who wishes their home to stay as clean as the freshly fallen snow outside.

Organizing your home entails assembling a good number of storage containers for everything from sugar cookies to Christmas lights and ornaments. The tree can create a mess as well, and if you choose an artificial tree, it will also need to be stored. When it comes to getting yourself and your home ready for this Christmas season, challenges abound. Getting started early, even before Thanksgiving, is a good way to thwart the coming stress of December.

While one may not want to start decorating until after Thanksgiving, there is no real reason to not prepare for decoration. This is where organization can become an issue. The first thing you need to do is to begin cleaning your entire house. All of your non-seasonal knick-knacks need to go. Throw rugs and blankets may need to be replaced as well.

Boxes of all sizes are invaluable for holiday storage and organization. This starts with storing your non-holiday items in order to make room for the Christmas tree and more. Label the boxes by room, and begin filling them up with the items that you are getting replacing. When a box is full move it into storage. Once your home is thoroughly desolate and devoid of decorative flair you can begin to think of your Christmas decorations.

Getting your actual decorations out can be a major hassle. This is the year to overhaul your storage system. Get rid of those cardboard boxes and replace them with plastic containers. Plastic is sturdier, stacks more easily, protects your items better and can simplify your storage process. Furthermore, plastic containers have been tweaked to fit any purpose. Many boxes can easily fit up to sixteen ornaments in safe individual compartments. The boxes come in three snap together trays that can, when put together, can safely store twenty-seven or twenty-eight ornaments. You no longer have to worry about losing precious keepsakes when you store your ornaments. Furthermore, you can avoid the waste of time that comes with wrapping ornaments in layer after layer of newspaper. These simple boxes provide perfect protection for all of your tree trimmings. They also can work wonderfully to stow bows, ribbons and other wrapping accessories.

Another frequent organizational nightmare associated with preparing for the Christmas season is dealing with all of the wrapping paper and ribbon. Keeping these items stored without damage can be a significant challenge. It’s a good idea to store all your gift-wrapping supplies in one location. Hang them on a door for storage, so they don’t get crushed. This can help you keep the rest of your house organized for Christmas.

A final crucial step for getting your house organized for Christmas is to prepare your kitchen. The Christmas holiday season can easily be referred to as baking season, and if you plan on doing a lot of work in your kitchen, then you better be ready. Forget your spring cleaning routine, now is the time to get that kitchen cleaned out. Get your spice rack organized, move those pots to the most accessible location, and get your appliances reorganized to fit your baking needs. For most of the year your kitchen should be organized to meet your day to day needs. But during the holidays, your day to day necessities are thrown aside. Rather then focusing on the meat and potatoes of mealtime you may find yourself emphasizing the cookies and cakes during this time of year. One of the largest organizational disasters that come along with Christmas is trying to work around a kitchen that is not built for baking. You need to rework this room, or your sanity is going to be tested throughout the entire season.

Getting ready for the Christmas holiday season should start just before Thanksgiving. Even if you are one who refuses to decorate until after Thanksgiving, there is work to be done and the benefits can be very rewarding. Begin your organizational work now, and you can be well on your way to a more relaxed holiday season around the house or apartment. However, if you procrastinate, things can quickly become quite hectic and stressful. Invest in the proper storage materials, deal with the problem of wrapping paper and overhaul your kitchen. These steps should set you well on your way to a happy and peaceful Christmas holiday season.

34 Ways To DIY Your Christmas: Great Gifts You Can Make!

Here are some really great tips from the guys over at Get Rich Slowly on how to save money this christmas.

He also has a link to Alton Brown who just happens to be the coolest chief on TV!

There are tips on everything from unbaked cookies, themed gift baskets to homemade hand warmers and beanbags. Beanbags! You gotta love it! I’m not to sure about the memory drawing unless you’re giving it to your mom I’m not sure it will be appreciated. (Mom always thought I was special!)

Well what are you waiting for? Get over there and make your stuffed pig fit into your gingerbread house (care of Lifehacker)!

A Do-It-Yourself Christmas: 34 Great Gifts You Can Make Yourself * Get Rich Slowly.

What things does your family do to get ready for the Christmas season?

What does your family do to get ready for the holidays,do you decorate your house for the Christmas season,do you wear special clothes(example would be red turtle neck green pants) I plan on printing out lots of Christmas coloring pages and then coloring them and glittering them and cutting them out and decorating the house,I wonder should I get started now or wait till a week before Thanksgiving,
I love wearing, red,blue,white,green,yellow.

Shopping for Gadget Gifts This Christmas Season

Christmas is less than two months away. I am sure that most of you are already coming up with gift lists. But are your lists done and ready for Christmas shopping? I know coming up with gift ideas can be very challenging. You must have certain criteria when deciding which items to get already. I am sure that there are two main things you consider when buying gifts – relevance and budget. As opposed to birthdays, which are scattered throughout the year, Christmas is the season when you have to remember quite a number of people – your parents, your partner, your children and maybe some very close friends. Let me help tone down your stress levels. Have you ever thought of giving gadgets as Christmas gifts to your loved ones? If one of your loved ones is a gadget enthusiast, then what else is there for you to worry about? For one thing, gadgets are not contained to just the latest laptops, mobile phones or mp3 players. There are other nifty gadgets that can be both fun and functional. Here are tips on shopping for gadgets. ListenThe most important thing is to listen. Throughout the year, I am sure that either your partner or any of your kids have hinted the gadgets they would want to buy for themselves or receive for their birthdays or Christmas. Keep your ears open for these hints and try to jot them down. This “wishlist” will definitely help you when the time for Christmas shopping comes. Seek the Help of the InternetThe internet is full of information on the latest gadgets and unique gifts. Looking at online stores and catalogs is a great way to find the best gadget gifts. Why? Because online listings and catalogs do not only have a list of the full features of the items, but also reviews from people who have already tried and tested them. Finding great online stores for gadgets is not difficult. Actually, it’s just one Google search away. Be Unique and RelevantAlways take into consideration the personality and interests of the person to whom you are giving a Christmas gift. He might like gadgets, but he may appreciate certain special or unique gifts more. For example, if you have a son who’s always talking or texting 24/7, you can give him a battery-powered Emergency Mobile Phone Charger. That way he never has to worry about getting a low-battery notification. Or if your partner has very important documents on his or her laptop, why not giving him or her a Wireless PC Security Lock? Christmas shopping need not be hard on your pockets. Sure, if you do have some money for the latest gadgets, then by all means, indulge your loved ones! But you know, not all gadgets need to be expensive for them to be fun and functional.