Cutest things ever.

It's no secret that I love my dogs. We treat them as if they were our actual children (often making us wonder if we will ever treat our future children as well as we treat our dogs!). Last year I really wanted to get ornaments for them - since it was their first Christmas with us.

Well, I never found any that worked. Since they're mutts, it's much harder. There is absolutely no breed that looks even remotely similar to either of our dogs. I didn't want to do a photo ornament and I didn't want to get just a generic one with their names painted on them. I found one place on Etsy that would create custom ornaments but they were $40 each. I love my dogs, but $80 for two ornaments? Sorry, girls. At least you made the Christmas card that year.

So after Christmas I just kept searching. I figured at some point I'd find someone who makes ornaments cheaper. Finally, I found someone on Etsy who would make them for about $16 each. Still a little expensive, but much more reasonable than $40. Plus, her stuff looked so adorable and she seemed so confident that she could capture our two pups. I sent her some pictures, told her I wanted to make sure the ornaments showed Chloe's gigantic ears and Roxy's brindle.

A reference picture:

And the actual ornaments:

I love them! You can find them at Sally's Bits of Clay. You can choose ornament colors and whether or not you want the hats. Total customization.

Biker Buddies

I like to give people ornaments. I know that’s not super exciting or super original, but it can be somewhat original if you do it right. I’m talking about doing more than Hallmark’s specialty ornament of that year here.

One of my bestests, Cinnamon, lives in Florida (the beautiful state that hubby and I will *hopefully* be moving to soon!). She and her boyfriend ride bikes for fun. They each have their own bikes but they also have a super cool tandem bike! (I’m only a little jealous!)

This year I found this nifty little ornament representing one of their favorite hobbies as a couple:

How many times do you see a Christmas ornament with a guy and a girl tandem bike riding? I’d never seen one before, so I jumped right on it! (Less than $15 on Amazon, using a gift card so it was yet another free gift to give this Christmas).

Hopefully she will think of me every Christmas when she puts it on her tree J

Ho, Ho, Ho!

I meant to jump on board and update all through Thanksgiving to show my newfound commitment to this blog…but hubby wound up with pneumonia so that kind of altered a lot of my plans. Pneumonia is not cool, by the way, not cool at all.

Moving on…

It’s always fun to give a gift that you know your recipient will enjoy. Bonus points when the gift revolves around a hobby or favorite activity of the recipient. Major extra credit points? When it’s something you and your recipient BOTH enjoy!

My best friend and I trade ornaments each year for Christmas. Nothing extravagant, just something small and meaningful. A few years ago, we had been hot and heavy into Scrabble on Facebook. Since she lived in Richmond and I lived in Charlotte, it was a fun way to keep in touch while playing one of our favorite games. So I got a great idea…

A scrabble tile ornament!

Granted, you could probably make something similar pretty easily…but I didn’t want to buy a whole game just for the tiles. Can you buy just the tiles? Something to look into…

Anyways, it’s only $7.95 and you can find it here. It’s out of stock now but just google “Scrabble ornaments” and you can get a few more choices than you could when I was looking.