Merry Greetings!

Baby, it's cold outside! Another 4 inches of snow here over this past weekend -- that's four crazy-cold weekends in a row where we have had wet weather and spectacularly moody falls days in the build up to Halloween. Yes, the frost is on the pumpkin but we've got Christmas on the mind!

In this issue:
-- Old and New Friends
-- Educating Elves
-- Site of the Week
-- How many cards will you receive?
-- A Child's View of the Nativity
-- The Tough Letters to Santa
-- Christmas Funnies
-- Link 'o the Week
-- Hot Topics
-- War on Christmas Update
-- Sing Christmas
-- Merry Christmas Radio On Demand
-- Chattering About Christmas

The Merry News is brought to you by:

Old and New Friends

Time on the Internet is measured differently than reality. A year online is like a decade offline.

That makes many of our sites like My Merry Christmas and Jinglebell Junction real pioneers in the world of the Internet, particularly in the Christmas community online. We have watched with sadness over the past 12 months as some long-time favorite Christmas venues have suddenly vanished. Christmas websites usually suffer from a lack of visitors during part of the year -- and a flood of too many of them the rest of the year. For those who try to make a living from running a Christmas website it can be a rough ride and one that, sadly, many just do not survive.

The sites that make up what we call the Merry Network are different from most sites you see associated with Christmas online. We're not really a company -- we're more like a co-op -- a band of brothers online who work together to stay online. Our sites generally have little or nothing to do with making money. By and large we exist just to celebrate the season we all love. By working together, we stay online. Your support of our sponsors or the occasional efforts we make to sell a Christmas-related product or service through our sites goes a long way to help, too.

We are pleased to announce the following additions to our merry family of holiday related websites:

Why Christmas? -- A UK-based site that has been a favorite bookmark of ours for years and years! Webmaster James Cooper has lovingly presented Why Christmas with a cheerful heart and a steady hand all these years in an effort to not only celebrate the season but to provide clear, concise definitions of all our cherished holiday traditions.

Magical Holiday Home -- We panicked briefly when another cherish Christmas venue -- Organized Christmas.com announced that they will be closing their forums in January 2008. But we were reassured that OrganizedChristmas.com is actually not going anywhere -- they are in fact continuing their grand Christmas traditions online. Magical Holiday Home is the creation of one of their own and many of their fine community have rallied around it in this new creation -- our FIFTH Christmas forum. Like OrganizedChristmas.com, this new venue will focus on the wonderful banter shared by those with inspired ideas of home and family celebration of the season. In less than a week of operation Magical Holiday Home already has close to 200 members and thousands of posts. We have highlighted some of their discussions in our Hot Topics section below.

A Magical Christmas appealed to me right away as a new affiliate to the Merry Network because behind the efforts of one very festive individual lies a site bursting with merry enthusiasm for the season. A Magical Christmas is a blog -- and that means you'll always get a very personalized take on everything from traditions to recipes associated with the season. We look forward to watching A Magical Christmas grow!

Educating Elves

Elf Ernest has picked up his pen a little earlier this year and already we have an Update from the North Pole. Seems that October is the month when Santa puts his elves through some training. Read Elf Ernest's report on the Annual Elf Convention. We expect to be hearing more regularly from Elf Ernest from here on out.

Site of the Week

Two related items for you this time from Christmas Finest, our site of Christmas reviews:

First is the result of recent consumer surveys about what we want for Christmas 2007 -- and can you believe the Apple iPhone didn't make this list?

And second, a light-hearted yet serious accounting of what the 12 days of Christmas are going cost this year from the PNC Annual Christmas Price Index.

By the way, we remind you that the purpose of Christmas Finest is to find and identify the best of Christmas online. If you know of a website, a Christmas product or service that you just love online please nominate that site for recognition at Christmas Finest. We still have about a month before we come out with our annual awards.

How many cards will you receive?

On Halloween we take down the submission page for this year's Christmas Card Exchange -- so you'd better hurry if you want to stuff your mailbox with dozens of Christmas cards from around the world this Christmas. Click here to learn about it or click here to talk about it. But whatever you do -- get with it! Time is running out to be included this season.

A Child's View of the Nativity

After hearing the Christmas story and singing “Silent Night”, a Sunday School Class in Sao Paulo, Brazil was asked to draw what they thought the Nativity Scene might have looked like.

One little fellow did a good likeness of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, but off to the side was a roly-poly figure.

The teacher, afraid that he had somehow worked St. Nick into the scene asked him who that was. She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or even more worried when the boy responded, “Oh, that’s Round John Virgin.”

For more festive blurbs like this one please be sure to visit our Christmas Blog. And if you want to contribute to this fun, ongoing street-corner-bell-ringing celebration of the season, just contact me about blogging about Christmas!

The Tough Letters to Santa Claus

Christmas 2001 was by far the toughest when it came to answering Santa's mail.

Thousands of emails to Santa poured into My Merry Christmas.com by kids and adults concerned over the events of 9/11. But no letter touch me so thoroughly as the letter received from the little boy who lost his mother in the World Trade Center.

"My mom died on September 11, 2001", Brandon stated in his letter. "All I want for Christmas is to get her back. Why did she have to die in the building, Santa?"

How would you handle such a letter? Check out my blog on Clausnet.com to read the rest of this fond Christmas memory from a man who plays the Big Guy online.

Christmas Funnies



For more great Christmas funnies, click here.

Link 'O the Week

Link Christmas is our attempt to build the World's Biggest Christmas Link Directory. Each week, all year long, we scour the Internet for new Christmas sites. Here are some recent finds posted to Link Christmas:

Organised Christmas Elves -- More great folks from Organized Christmas -- this group is based in the UK. Give them a click!

World of Halloween -- There is still a little time to celebrate Halloween!

TERD.org -- Seriously scientific Santa research.

Hot Topics

What's the buzz on all the Christmas forums as we head into October? Here's a brief rundown of hot topics:

-- Merry Forums -- The worst Christmas album ever?
-- Merry Forums -- Christmas Photos 2007
-- Merry Forums -- The Merry Forums Great Prize Giveaway Winners
-- Talk Christmas -- The City that Stole Christmas
-- Talk Christmas -- Started Any Decorating Yet?
-- Talk Christmas -- The Christmas Movies That We Own
-- Clausnet -- Your Favorite Santa Films
-- Clausnet --Santa Richard's Challenge
-- Clausnet --How I Got My Start As Santa
-- Christmas Talk -- Eggnog Bread Pudding
-- Christmas Talk -- Fireside Chat with Auntie Mistletoe
-- Christmas Talk -- Have You Done Anything Christmasy Today?
-- Magical Holiday Home -- Great Pumpkin Day Idea List
-- Magical Holiday Home -- Thanksgiving Celebration
-- Magical Holiday Home -- Halloween Films for Kids

War on Christmas Update

Wow -- nothing generated email from our last newsletter like our update on the War on the War on Christmas. Here are recent headlines making news since we last updated you:

- Clay Aiken Caught Up in Christmas Controversy
- Calif. Man Has to Tone Down Christmas Lights
- Mrs. Fields Attacked for Avoiding Christmas
- Researcher Claims Scientific Proof of the Christmas Star
- Did the city really steal Christmas?

Sing Christmas

Presented by our friends at Why Christmas?, Sing Christmas is a great little page that will play the music of all your favorite hymns and carols of Christmas and show you the lyrics to sing. Gather round the computer and warm up those pipes. There's Christmas to sing about!

Merry Christmas Radio On Demand

Here it is not even Halloween and already there's a crowd at MCR. With the click of a mouse you can get all the classics of Christmas coupled with today's great new releases playing 24/7 at Merry Christmas Radio.

The problem is this: it's Internet radio. And that means there is a cap of 100 listeners at a time -- and we've reached our cap several times already this season.

What to do? Get a VIP membership to Live365. By clicking this link you not only guarantee access to the station any time you want but you also help pay for our broadcast costs (we make NO money on Merry Christmas Radio) and you get all the Christmas you can handle without commercials.

Get your Christmas music on demand while you browse the sites of the Merry Network. (And look for our seasonal debut of this season's most exciting new releases from Josh Groban, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Toby Keith, Olivia Newton-John and others).

Chattering About Christmas

Don't forget that every Sunday night we get together from wherever we are in the evenings to talk about Christmas in real time at Christmas Chatter.

It is a very informal affair and one we hope you'll take more advantage of as the season gets a little closer.

And keep your eye on the Merry Forums for a new schedule of specialized chats we're going to try this year. The ladies from Magical Holiday Home are working up a chat and we plan to have the program directors from Merry Christmas Radio work up a live show some time this year where we'll be chatting online AND doing a live radio broadcast at the same time (we're always making history, don't you know). We've got Santa scheduled to stop by every now and then as well as Elf Ernest. So things will be happening at Christmas Chatter.com this year!

Christmas Chatter.com is a completely free venue. If you've got family or a group of friends that you want your own space dedicated to for a chat there some night just get hold of me and we'll gladly make it happen. Getting together is what Christmas is all about! When my wife and I went on a cruise last year we used Christmas Chatter from the ship to yell at, er, communicate with our children at home!

Pumpkin Piracy

With the snow falling on Saturday we piled everyone in the car in an attempt to resurrect the old fashioned tradition of pumpkin hunting. When I was a kid this was an October tradition for me every year.

But folks clearly don’t do it much any more. You can get a plastic blow mold pumpkin or perhaps some sort of fancy silicon jack-o-lantern at Walmart already pre-lit and contorted in a way you could never carve. We took a circuitious route through the country and up into the mountains in search of a good old fashioned pumpkin patch but never found one. We ended up about two hours later back within a few miles of home at a local nursery. They had done a nice job in arranging all the pumpkins on bales of hay and presented a wide variety of knarled and knotted pumpkins in all shapes and even colors. They had a price printed on the bottom of each pumpkin. Unfortunely, they ranged in price from $5 to $12 and with at least six pumpkins to buy that would end up being quite a bill. I let the kids look around. But I absolutely forbade even asking to get a pumpkin there.

We enjoyed the ambience for a little while and then piled back in the car and headed for a grocery store where we bought pumpkins for 12 cents a pound. $8 took care of our pumpkin needs as a family and we were on our way.

I see opportunity in this. I ought to follow up on it. Families should not have to put out $50 or more just for a good pumpkin experience.

This has always been a dream of mine -- to sell pumpkins in the fall, Christmas trees right after that, and fireworks all summer long. It would be good to be the pumpkin king!

Happy Halloween from all of us at the Merry Network!

-- All the best,
Jeff