Snapshot Chronicles

Susan Getgood's personal blog

And a partridge in a pear tree

by //

IMG_3556 IMG_3555 IMG_3554

I love Christmas. Decorating the house. The Christmas tree. Sending Christmas cards. Baking Christmas cookies and making the holiday dinner. Even buying gifts, although I always aim to be done by Thanksgiving.

All of that is pretty normal, more or less.

Here’s the twisted part, at least if you ask my mother. Call it my dirty little Christmas secret. Some people like romance novels. Others enjoy reality tv. I like Christmas music. A lot.

So much so that I even buy it. Lots of it. Classical. Jazz. Pop. Oldies. This year’s addition is an album by the a cappella group Straight No Chaser. You may have seen their version of the 12 Days of Christmas on YouTube:

By the way, even though she doesn’t understand my obsession with Christmas music, my mom is a good sport about it. She’s the one who sent me the YouTube link in the first place.

She’s also part of some of my best Christmas memories, including the ones evoked by the ornaments featured at the top of this post. We made these more than 20 years ago. Every weekend, we would spend one day at my grandparents’ house. In the spring and summer we’d help with the gardening, in the fall we’d rake and in November and December, we did Christmas things.

I can still see my grandfather, who died in 1989, sitting at the table watching us make the ornaments. He got tremendous amusement from the fact that I managed to make one for every six or so my mom made. Mine had to be perfect, you see. [As I’ve gotten older, and especially since I had Douglas eight years ago, I have somewhat relaxed my attitude toward perfection. A little.]

Back to the story. I think he got as much pleasure from watching us joke and laugh as we made the ornaments as he did from any of the more formal holiday hoopla. It’s been nearly 20 years, and every year when I place those ornaments on the tree, I miss him all over again.

And remember how lucky I am that he was my grandfather.

My best wishes to all of you for a safe and happy holiday and a wonder-filled new year. I’ve created a Jacquie Lawson holiday card just for you, which can be viewed at this link.

I’ll leave you with the lyrics to one of my all-time favorite holiday songs, May Every Day Be Christmas by Louis Jordan.

“May every day be Christmas
And every day be blessed
Let the end of every day be filled with happiness
And may the Lord be good to you with every rising sun
All through the day have a smile for everyone
At night time comes a longing to be with ones you love
To sit around the fireside and dream of stars above
So may God bless you and keep you, come what may
Then every day will be a happy day
May good times come to you every day”

Meet MY Indiana Jones; Capital One/Newsweek Photo Contest

by //

Halloween 2008

IMG_3416

—

Twitter friends may recall my tweets yesterday morning about a PR pitch I received that was actually relevant. It wasn’t perfect by any means; it was still clearly a mass e-mail, a bit too long and promo-speaky, and had a press release attached. BUT… it was for a photo contest from Capital One and Newsweek. I do occasionally write about photo contests on Snapshot Chronicles.

I have no idea whether the agency who sent the pitch just got lucky or did a decent job of blog targeting. After all, the volume game in PR counts on the fact that if you send enough pitches, you are bound to hit on a few. I also have seen a fair share of not-so-great pitches from the same agency over the past few years. However, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

And tell you all about the photo contest. The theme for the contest is American Life, and the angle is that Capital One lets consumers personalize the image for their credit card. Online consumer votes from January 6 to February 6, 2009 will determine 50 semi-finalists and Newsweek Photo Editor Simon Barnett will pick the winners. The prizes are reasonable, but not excessive, and you can enter up to five photos per day. More details on the contest page.

Chances of winning? Pretty slim unless you really work at it, tag your photos properly and get out the vote. But is it pretty simple to enter; I did it quickly through the contest page and you can also enter through a Flickr group, which should make it dead easy.

Here are the photos I entered:

DouglasWaterSlide

DouglasBeach

DouglasBeach2

IvantheGiraffe

DouglasBeach3

All the pictures were taken during our vacation in San Diego last April. The beach pictures were taken on Coronado Island and the water slide was at the resort. The giraffe is Ivan the 19 year old male at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We went on one of the photo safaris where you actually go into the enclosures and feed the giraffes. It was tremendously special at the time, but even more so when we learned that Ivan died of old age about a week after our visit. More pictures from that day on Flickr.

[tags] halloween, Indiana Jones, photo contest, san diego, beach [/tags]