Making my list, checking it twice...

I know I'm not the only one who's trying to get things done early for Christmas this year so I'm not running around mid-December like a chicken with her head cut off. Lovely image for the holidays, isn't it?

Here's a gift idea I'm working on: personalized signs...like the cute ones on etsy.com with vinyl letters. I may just order those, but I wanted to try my hand at making them myself sans vinyl, just a steady hand and acrylic paints. Since I'm fairly sure Mr. Smarty's 11 year old cousin doesn't check my blog, I'll show you what I attempted for him for Christmas (Yankee colors!!!):



And now I have a question. This year our families are seriously considering drawing names for Christmas. I say seriously considering, because we have suggested this every year for the past five years and never actually gone through with it. SOOO, this morning, my bro-bro and I got on Skype and drew names. He put all our names (adults only) in his old beanie and in order of our ages, drew one name for that person to buy/make for. I recorded whose name he pulled for everybody and Laura witnessed (we will tolerate no arguments here). To be honest, we did draw names twice though, because the first round ended up looking kind of boring...couples got each other-so we could have all stayed home and been done with it. But where's the fun in that?

So now we need to draw names with Mr. Smarty's family. Any recommendations? Should they be kept a secret until Christmas? How do you all include or exclude kiddos-especially when not everyone has kids? Any other ideas for keeping the holidays sane while still encouraging the spirit of giving?