We made it!

Well, we’ve come to the conclusion of another great season at Personalizedfree.com!  Many thanks to all of our faithful customers who return to our site year after year, and also a big Thank You for all the newbies this season.  We’re confident you had a great experience with us and will spread the word for next year.  We trust that everyone had a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  After shipping thousands of ornaments over the last few months, we shipped ourselves to the Caribbean for a cruise to help celebrate Wendy’s grandmother’s 90th birthday!  For an end of the year festivity, this was very relaxing, but had it’s stressful moments!  With 3 small kids to monitor every second of the day for 8 days, it was a bit rough at times.  However, visiting with family, seeing great beaches, and eating all day long, definitely made this an exciting and needed vacation!  Happy New Year, everyone.  We’ll keep writing throughout the year, so keep in touch!

The Christmas Ornament Assembly Line

We have reached our Peak Week in The Ornament House, and are we ever feeling it!  It is such a mad scramble to get everyone’s Christmas ornament orders out the door that we’re working darn near around the clock.  We’re regularly going to bed after 3am and it’s starting to catch up to us.  No worries to our customers, though.  The ornaments are still chugging down the assembly line looking as fantastic as ever!  Our personalizers and shippers are doing a fabulous job in getting orders out in record time.  Incoming orders are being pulled, processed, checked, packaged, and shipped within 2 days!  We can faintly see the light at the end of the tunnel and it just so happens that the light represents a much needed vacation.  Our poor kids are starved for attention, so we’ve got some serious making up to do before they form a union and decide to move into grandma’s house!

The Santa Visit – When is it too Early?

When Santa visits the mall, you know Christmas is right around the corner.  In our local mall, that means the middle of November!  Is that too early?  Should we REALLY be thinking about Christmas two weeks after the last trick-or-treater knocks on our door?  Should malls be fully decked out before the turkey hits the table?  In the case of Costco, we’re talking about late summer, but that’s another story.  In our case, the pre-Thanksgiving visit to Santa works out perfectly.  Our Christmas business at www.personalizedfree.com keeps us shackled to our house like a disobedient reindeer for the entire month of December.  In fact, the kids are lucky (or unlucky) that we even have the time to take them to school.  If not for Santa making his annual appearance in November, our poor children would grow up wondering if they would EVER meet the Big Cheese himself.  One of the best reasons for going in November is that you rarely have to wait in line.  How many times have you stood in a long line—only to have Santa go on a lunch break for an hour once you finally reached the front?  It’s tempting to throw your kids in front of him while he’s sitting down in the mall’s Food Court, but who wants a picture of Santa with ketchup in his beard?  Not me, which is why November is the best time for the precious picture.  The number one reason for going early?  You get great pictures like this because the kids haven’t melted down while waiting in line.  What are your thoughts?  How early does your family visit Santa?

Holly, Santa, Jason, Jamie

Putting up the Christmas Lights!

Christmas lights–the one thing guys dread the most every year. Sure, they look great once they’re UP, but getting them to that point takes time, imagination, and very careful balance while on the roof! Each year, the grueling task of completing our light display seems to stretch further into the dark, cold night. The reason? Wendy likes to stock up on more decorations in January when everything is 99% off retail! The thing she doesn’t realize is that we may have cheap decorations, but the power bill associated with all this “savings” more than counteracts any bargain she may have found. I kid you not, when our lights are all turned on, our meter is spinning so fast that you could dry your hands over it. Granted, we don’t have quite the display that Clark Griswold provided his family in Christmas Vacation, but we’re definitely in the upper bracket within our town. I have two days until Operation Don’t-Kill-Myself begins.  The best I can hope for is a day without rain, and temperatures that don’t freeze the saliva in my mouth.  I think I’m going to get only one of those.  The flashback dreams have already begun from all of the close calls on the roof that have nearly ended my career as a humble House Light Technician.  One of those visions seems to always find its way to the front:  As I’m holding on for dear life, 30 feet off the ground, and trying to hook the last string of lights on the highest peak of the house, I’m thinking to myself, “Is this really worth it?” Well, once I see the smile on my kids’ faces, it most definitely is.

Soccer Parties

Is there a bigger racket in all of sports than the end-of-the-season soccer party? Don’t get me wrong, I love my soccer team and all of the great parents we are fortunate enough to share the experience with, but how much is too much? Do we really need a huge cake, trophies, and pizza?  Of course, the kids are going to shout YES, and I tend to agree with them!   My case is rare, because I consider all the parents of my girls my friends, so going out for pizza and beer is not exactly something I need to weigh my options first!  But what about the parents of other teams that don’t really get to know each other during the season? Can standard tradition of the uncomfortable soccer party be broken and maybe have a “No-Kids Get-Together” down at the local coffee shop or watering hole? A good social night out is just what a lot of these parents need…BEFORE the season! After all, the same team is probably going to be together for several years, so why not break loose and get to know each other now and enjoy the ride like we are? I’ve looked across the field way too many times this season, only to see the parents from the opposing team all segregated as if each couple had a contagious disease the others wanted no part of.  How fun is that?  Where is the camaraderie?  The excitement?  The thrill of sharing your daughter’s first goal with someone else?  I feel sorry for the girls on my team in a humorous way. When I look down our own sideline, all the parents are huddled up, laughing, and discussing where to go afterwards…all the while, watching their daughters with one eye at best!  Who says the parents can’t have fun?!?  I made a DVD slideshow with great pictures covering the season and gave it to each of the parents at our soccer party. The main reason?  So the parents could see what they missed while chatting at the game! I didn’t know what to expect when venturing into coaching this year, but I must say, I am probably the luckiest dad in the league to be blessed with such a great group of kids and parents.  It’s too bad that not everyone else can say the same.

A Brief Break in The Ornament House

Last night we took a brief break from the Christmas ornament business and turned The Ornament House into the Old Folks Home! That’s right, I turned 40! To help celebrate the milestone, Wendy organized a terrific party with family and friends. We had great food, beer, wine, and lots and lots of fun! My brother, Sean, even put together a fantastic slide show detailing all the years of my life. I had no idea that I’d been through so much! I know it’s a common question for people to ask if I “feel” like I’m 40. Yesterday, my answer was easily NO, but after a long night of celebrating, I can honestly say I feel like I’m 80 today! Thank you everyone for a memorable night! Now, it’s back to work. There sure are days where I wish I was back to the age I was in this picture!

Personalized Team ornaments for all sorts of Sports

Each year we get emails from coaches looking for something different for their team that is a remembrance of the year.  Ornaments have always been a hit with the kids and parents. Here’s an order we did recently for a volleyball team in Temple City, CA.  Looks like the brunettes outnumber the blondes on this team.  If you are looking for team ornaments, just take a look at our sports section and see if there is one that will work for your team.

Bunco Ornaments

Halloween Week has Begun!

The first costume event of Halloween Week is officially over!  We took the kids, along with their cousin, Kristin, to the local YMCA where they had a Halloween event complete with games, crafts, and lots and lots of “prizes” to take home!  Who makes this junk, and why do we continue to pile it up in our house?  Seriously, the manufacturing costs of these “toys” must be no more than one cent each, but the children get at least five cents of fun out of them.  It’s marketing genius, and somebody is making a killing off all of us suckers!  The kids had a bucket full of plastic toys that I’m still trying to figure out what the primary purpose of the things are.  One was just a plastic stick, with more plastic sticking out of the sides, that you twirl around and it makes an irritating noise.  Another was one of those “mini-maze” puzzles with the tiny ball-bearing that nobody in their right mind would try and navigate.  I take that back.  I gave it a feeble attempt while waiting for the rest of the family to try and win a “homemade” cake at the Cake Walk.  Nothing but good old fashioned luck in this game.  The best strategy I can recommend is to have a large family that takes up at least a quarter of the spots.  We still lost!  Oh, well.  The lack of junk food secured tonight was only the calm before the storm.  Come the 31^st, we’ll have enough candy to start giving it away online with the purchase of every personalized Christmas ornament!

Not a Fun Saturday for The Ornament House Gang!

The weekend did not get off to a great start. In soccer, both Jamie and Holly’s team got absolutely creamed in the rain! I lost count somewhere around 10-1 in both games. The only highlight was watching Jason decked out in his rain gear and running wild like he was at Disneyland! After the double-header of soccer clunkers, we spent some time working on getting Christmas ornament orders ready to ship, as well as prepare some new ornaments for uploading to the website. Finally, with Wendy off to a wine function at the Seattle Art Museum with a couple of friends, I got the kids to bed early to hunker down with a barrel of popcorn and watch the UW – ASU football game–only to watch the Huskies inexplicably lose their heads and give the game away in the final seconds. Oh, well. At least the kids went to bed good…at 7:30pm! I feel kind of guilty about that, but hey, there was a big football game to watch!