Why I Oughta...

On Thursday, I shared some photos of the gifts we received from the Reddit Disney Gift Exchange this year and above shows the gifts we 'gave' as part of the program this year. Here's the post showing what we 'gave' last year in 2015 . The person we matched with lived in Nevada and professed their love of Cinderella and a specific set of Disney pins - which made it easy.  We went with a Cinderella Mickey ears Christmas ornament and that set of five princess pins.   She seemed happy as the pins helped her complete a set. The girls had fun picking out the right items from the Disney store and I had fun teaching them about random acts of kindness.

For the second year in a row, we participated in Reddit's Disney Gift Exchange with the girls being the 'intended audience' of the gifts being sent and received.   Here's my post from last year's exchange where we gave away some Peter Pan and Wendy gear to a Redditor .   I'll post the details of what we 'gave' at some point, but here's the details on what we were sent.  I posted the full note here on RedditGifts, so you can see the full story .  Our "Santa" was super thoughtful and asked a bunch of questions.  Turns out, they were in couple in Kansas who are Disney fans (just like us) but don't have kids, so they loved (so they said!) being paired up with our girls.   The day the box arrived, we let the girls open it.  And on top was a sweet little note from their pal Mickey: And under the little tote bag was this bounty!   Ermahgerd ! Tons of stuff for both girls.  They were in heaven! And some pins f...

Once again this year, I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa.  My giftee in this year's version posted the gift I sent in the gallery with a 'feel good' post title of "BEST GIFT EVER" .  When I went to retrieve my match, he gave me some good stuff to work with:  he enjoys trying different kind of beers and he just starting building his own bar in his basement. So...after a bit of searching, I landed on this wood wall-hanging map of the country that hold bottle caps .  Seems like a good conversation-starter in the bar, right?  Collect different caps from different craft breweries around the country and place them in their regions. Here's all the posts on the blog about the different gift exchanges I've participated in (including Christmas for multiple years and a Disney one) on Reddit over the years.

Back in May, I posted with glee about Reddit having a Disney gift exchange and charged right into the process by getting matched with a fellow Disney Redditor.  We dutifully filled out our preferences/answered the 3 Disney-related questions and awaited both being matched and who our 'match' was going to be. We ended up with a woman from the East Coast who loved all things Wendy Darling from Peter Pan.  Working with Nat and the girls, we packaged up and shipped a "Think of the happiest things" shirt from Etsy (Nat picked it out), a letter explaining things (from me!) and some pins and a MagicBandit from the girls collections that featured her favorite characters.  She posted the photos and description I screenshot above.   You can view it here in the gallery on the site . We haven't received our box yet, but based on the intel from the RedditGifts site, ours is on the way and has been verified as shipping.  I'll try to capture some video of the girls op...

And I just signed up to participate.  You can check out the details here on the Disney Gift Exchange page .  I've done the Secret Santa exchanges in the past around Christmastime, but none of the 'off season' exchanges have struck me enough to force me into participating. I know *some* of you guys are DisneyGeeks, so I come bearing good news:  There's still time to sign up.  They're going to close it down on June 1st (soon!), so you can head to the sign-up page and fill out their three easy questions (Favorite things about Disney, Favorite Disney Movies and Favorite Disney Characters) and you'll be on your way.

I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa gift exchange this past Christmas season and was matched with a woman in western Massachussets who was a foodie/cook.  I bought her the Flavor Bible based on her profile. My Secret Santa had sent me a note before Christmas saying that my gift was delayed because it was on backorder.  I waited and waited and waited.  In fact, Reddit bugged me to mark my gift as 'not received' because I think they wanted to close down the exchange and re-match folks.  But...my Santa was persistent.  At first, I thought I was getting scammed.  That...this dude was just emailing me to cover his rear in the Reddit system but that I was going to get shut out.  But...what was in it for him?  He could have just used (as I did) a throw-away account and moved on. He emailed me a few times saying that things were on their way and then last week, he finally delivered a UPS tracking number.  So...he was legit.  My Sec...