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 Christmas memory was when I forgot to tell Santa what I wanted. My family and I had went to the mall to visit Santa and, in a panic, I forgot what I was going to ask for (which was a black Britney Spear’s backpack with a purple locked diary included.) After a few days passed, I came home from school and there was a message on our answering machine from one of Santa’s elves! She said that Santa knew I was nervous and forgot, but he’ll definitely work on trying to get me the Britney Spear’s backpack. Sure enough when I woke up on Christmas morning the Britney Spear’s backpack was under the tree, diary and all. My parents still to this day don’t know how they elves got our phone number
I’m the oldest of four children, and we would often wake up prior to my parents getting up, sort all of our gifts into piles, and wait for them. This isn’t how my parents wanted the mornings to go so my dad came up with a riddle for us all. Each of the four kids had their gifts labeled with a riddle. We all had to crack the riddles to figure out which gift was for which kid. I think it was more fun to work together and figure it out than to actual open the gifts!
My dad has this fruitcake that he makes every year, usually a couple of days before Christmas, sometimes on Christmas Eve itself. I hated the cake when I was a kid, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to both love the cake itself as well as the tradition of helping my dad make it (now that I’m actually old enough to not just spill everything on the floor!). After graduating from grad school, I suddenly no longer had the luxury of being home for 2-3 weeks in the winter, and the first Christmas after graduating, I couldn’t make it home until a couple of days before Christmas. My dad had decided that he didn’t want to make the cake that year since I wouldn’t be home to help (and the rest of my family wasn’t as into it as me), but I managed to get him to do a frantic, last-minute shopping trip to gather up the ingredients we didn’t already have at home, and we ended up getting it all together in time for Christmas; it turned out to be one of the best batches we’ve ever made, too! I still have to convince him every year that I’m going to help as soon as I get home, but I think deep down he knows that it’s a tradition that I’m never going to abandon :) Now I just need to get him to translate the recipe so that I can actually read it…
My favorite Christmas memory is of when my family would go over to my Grandmother’s. Her house would be absolutely filled with Christmas decorations that were brought down from the attic. Many of us had to make multiple trips just to bring them all down. She loved her Coca Cola polar bears. She would buy so many gifts for my cousins, my sister, and I. I was big into the Cleveland Indians at the time and she would always gift me memorabilia that she got signed at the mall. We recently went back and watched some old tapes and the piles of gifts were so much larger than ourselves, had our parents not rushed us we could have been there all day opening gifts. The food wasn’t anything spectacular; we had turkey, egg noodles and other midwestern fare. The holiday spirit though came in the decorations and the crazy amount of gifts. What is nice about it is that when she passed, some of us took a few of her decorations so now everyone has a piece of those holiday memories.
Helping my mom set out all the gifts on Christmas Eve so that my younger siblings would be surprised when “santa” came! :)
When I was studying abroad my mom came and visited me and we went to the north of Scotland for Christmas weekend. It’s one of the few white christmases I’ve ever enjoyed and we got to eat lots of delicious food and drink lots of amazing wine, etc. It was also really special being just my mom I’m from a large family (which I love!) but to have that Christmas with just us is a great memory! The next year it also made me really appreciate my large loud family even more.
My favorite memory is waking up to a WHITE Christmas on the gulf coast of southern Texas in 2004. Our extended family was in town and celebrated the 5 inches of snow by building a snowman on the beach (complete with a bikini outfit) and having a good old fashioned snowball fight. It truly was a Christmas miracle!
My favorite winter memory is the start of my favorite family tradition and that is Fondue on Christmas eve. We have since grown the tradition to make it our own but I will never forget that first year drinking far too much wine and figuring out how to get 8 people around a hot oil pot and how to get the cheese fondue away from my dad!
Definitely, the year it was just my immediate family (my sister and I full grown). We had a duck cook off and it snowed enough for us to have the best snowball fight with our dad.
My mom told me Santa was calling to ask me what I wanted for Christmas and I was like why does he sound like Uncle Rico?