It’s giveaway time! It’s a massive one guys and I’m pretty excited! For the past week or so I’ve been featuring recipes using Staub, Shun, Cuttingboard.com, Finex, and Kitchen Aid and now’s the time to finally bundle everything up and give it all away. Well, not literally, because you’re actually going to win new items, so there’s no real bundling, just figurative bundling.
win this staub!
I hope you’ve been following along – so far I’ve made Slow Braised Japanese Chashu Pork, Mini Puff Pastry Roses, Caramel Corn and Rice Krispie Mix, and Mint Snowman Marshmallows, but with these giveaway items you can make pretty much anything, which is perfect for the holiday season.
win this shun knife and cuttingboard.com boo’s block!
I love food – as I’m sure you know – and one of my favorite Christmas memories is of me, my brother, and Christmas chocolates. As little kids, come the first of December, we would get chocolate advent calendars. I still see them around now: those thin cardboard drugstore boxes featuring a Christmas picture with tiny numbered windows and chocolates hiding behind them. My brother and I lived for that moment at the end of the day when we got to pry open the cardboard for our long awaited treat. Our eager fingers would melt the chocolate ever so slightly as we tried to eat our chocolates as slowly as possible.
win this finex cast iron pan!
One year, we got it in our heads that we didn’t want to wait. We snuck our calendars down to the basement – it was cold and dark down there and I didn’t like it but my brother convinced me it was the best place to hide – and ate every single chocolate. We ate the entire month of December. And the thing is, we did it in a gentle, artful way where we could close back the windows so that at a casual glance, you couldn’t tell that the calendar was ravaged.
win this kitchen aid!
Maybe it was the sugar-high making us crazy, but we totally thought we got away with it. That is, until it was time for our nightly ritual with our parents. Needless to say, there was no chocolate treat that night. Or the next night, or the next. But, it was okay, because come Christmas morning, there were still presents under the tree. Apparently, our chocolate binge didn’t leave us on Santa’s naughty list, which was a huge relief, because, presents.
These days I’m more into giving than receiving so I couldn’t resist putting together this giveaway for you! I wish I could send everyone a Christmas present but since I can’t, I thought I’d do the next best thing and giveaway some of my favorite things. So, let me know your favorite holiday memory and maybe you’ll be the lucky reader who wins! Good luck!
Giveaway: I’ve teamed up with some of my favorite brands to do a massive giveaway. One lucky reader will win:
Staub 4 Quart Round Cocotte
Shun 6-inch Dual Core Utility Knife
Cuttingboard.com Boos Block Walnut 20×15 Cutting Board
Finex 10-inch Cast Iron Pan
Kitchen Aid Artisan Design Series 5-Quart Stand Mixer w/Glass Bowl in Pearl Silver
To enter: Leave a comment on the blog with your favorite winter holiday memory. I want to hear ALL the details! I’ll randomly choose a winner and notify them through email. Open to US residents only. (Sorry international friends, only American companies agreed to this one!) If you’d like some extra entries use the widget below to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Contest ends December 21st at 12pm PST. Good luck!
The giveaway is closed! I’ll be announcing the winner in the next week or so after reading through all of the comments. Thank you everyone who entered! There are some beautiful memories here!
Update: Congrats Chelsea, you won! Look for an email from me shortly!
My favorite holiday memory so far is bringing Thanksgiving to my brother at his college campus dorm this year with our family. He has been so busy between military training, volunteering with his local fire dept., personal training for seniors and kids, along with his full-time schedule that we wanted to make sure to spend the day together for for the first time in a while. With the help from my mom and dad, we prepped all the food and brought over everything ready to be cooked so we didn’t have to spend too much time doing that once we arrived at my brother’s. He had made a point to use whatever resources were given to him and still managed to pull of a very beautiful table! Surprisingly, the most fun part of it all was cooking the remaining side dishes together, assigning everyone a job so we really each had a hand in the whole production. I won’t ever forget this enjoyable holiday that was filled with love!
My favorite holiday memory is one from years ago. I flew home and New York had so much snow that people in cars were getting stuck or stranded on the highway behind our house. We kept going out trying to shovel people out of snowdrifts or bringing some hot coffee and sandwiches. My neighbor ending up with a few strangers sleeping on his living room floor and everyone in the neighborhood was caught up in the sprit of giving.
Every Christmas eve at about 10 o’clock! My father sits everyone down and we watch it’s a wonderful life. We all basically take turns quoting the movie until we all fall asleep. My dad is only one who stays up till the very end and turns it off and tells everyone to go to bed. This is my favorite because every time George Bailey says “I want to live again Clarence”, we all bust in to tears and it just makes us all so happy!
One winter our family visited family friends in Seoul. We booked a retreat to one of the skiing ranges and all two families packed into two tiny cars and ventured off onto the dewy road. When we got there I, eight-year-old me, realized that no, I didn’t know how to ski. Obviously we did the smart thing, which was to just wing it after a few basic tips on how to ski (that didn’t exactly muster up some confidence). Needless to say, once the ski lift brought me up to top of the crazyfrigginhigh mountain I uneasily slid down, and proceeded to tumble while my friends and sisters skid past me. Because they couldn’t slow down amid the crowd of skiers and snowboarders I was left to fend for myself, which involved me ‘walking’ in my skis down to the finish line. My mother was scared to death that I was missing! But after a few tears and a bit of hot chocolate everything was fine and skiing is actually pretty darn fun.
And oh – the ginseng chicken soup and hot springs helped to seal the deal on this winter memory.
My favorite holiday memory was waking up as a child with my brothers to find beer and nachos left out from the night before. We were convinced they were left by Santa and swapped out cookies and milk in favor of beer and nachos for the next few years!
As kids, my brothers and I used to make extra special Christmas cookies for Santa, which we would leave out with a handwritten thank you note, a big glass of milk and some carrots for his reindeer. Over the course of a couple years, we noticed that Santa never really drank the glass of milk, but the cookies and carrots were always gone. After brainstorming with my brothers one Christmas Eve for a better drink option, we took it upon ourselves to pour Santa a very, very large glass of whiskey in addition to the traditional note, cookies and carrots. The next morning, we were ecstatic to find that all of our treats had been consumed, and Santa had written us a note in return, thanking us for being such thoughtful children and for being his favorite stop along his holiday route.
My favorite winter holiday memory is actually (if I can cheat a little bit) pre-traditional Christmas season. Around Thanksgiving, my mom, sister, and I would go for a walk at a local park called Pheasant Branch Conservancy on a fall day before the snows come, when the sun is out lighting up the prairie. It’s so beautiful and fresh out there, and it’s become our kind of small family tradition. Most of our family is overseas so having just a small one tradition is really meaningful.
I grew up in south Florida so Christmas here is not cold and we don’t have snow. I was the youngest in my family. Even though the rest of the year my siblings and I fought, the tried really hard to keep the magic of Christmas and Santa alive for me. They answered all my questions -like how does Santa get in when you don’t have a chimney. (The answer is through the washing machine or he shrinks himself to door knob size). They would spray our Christmas Tree with fake snow before I woke up so that I would know that Santa had been there the night before.
But my favorite Christmases are now that I’m a parent and getting to pass on the magic to my daughter. Kids grow up ao fast now and I know that there will come a time in the near future where she won’t believe in naughty and nice lists and the spirit of the season. But for now seeing her face light up when we pass a picture of Santa, or when she looks for her elf, baking, or when we think of something to give to her teacher reminds me of the wonder and joy I felt as a kid on Christmas with my tree and its snow.
My favorite holiday memories are a yearly thing! I love waking up and seeing my family from across the country, having a slice of my mom’s pumpkin bread with a cup of coffee, and then sitting down and watching movies with whoever is up. Once we are all up, we have a bit more coffee and huddle around the tree. Just being with family, in those early morning moments, is the best memory.
My favorite holiday memories are from our tradition of getting together with our family friends from Maine who would have built a massive gingerbread house. Each year we would get to decorate it with all the fixins, then do our best to stay up until midnight and not eat the entire thing before the morn…both of which were always a challenge, despite the mass amount of sugar we’d consumed during decoration. We’d usually hang out, 4 girls, in PJ’s chit chatting in our room and watching the clock as it got later.