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Some 20 years ago, the holiday season was tucked away in the attic until after Thanksgiving. Stores didn’t put up decorations and holiday commercials weren’t run until Black Friday. Today you ask? November 1st is holiday “go time”. Somehow our society manages to make the holiday season last two and a half months since it starts the day after Halloween and runs through all the sales that extend into January. All this holiday talk puts an immense amount of stress on people. With that said, sit back, relax, and let us suggest what we think are excellent gift ideas and holiday movie suggestions.

Top 10 Holiday Movie List

Our first piece of advice is to start a fire in the fireplace, grab a blanket, and cozy on up to our very own MS Companies’ employee top 10 favorite holiday movie list. The list contains old classics, new comedies, great love stories, and a questionable Santa.

• Scrooged
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• A Charlie Brown Christmas
• White Christmas
• A Christmas Story
• Elf
• Home Alone
• Christmas Vacation
• Love Actually
• Bad Santa

Original Gift Ideas

Need an idea for a gift that’s different? We’ve researched this excruciatingly painful topic and have come up with, we hope, some original ideas.

• Believe it or not there is a cheese of the month club. You can purchase this gift on William Sonoma’s website and receive 3 cheeses a month for 3 months. If you know someone who likes a good piece of cheese, this is the gift for them.
• A great gift for kids to give a mother (with the help of dad) is have themselves professionally photographed together. It is more personal if you can have the pictures taken at your own home or another location that has sentimental value.
• A good gift idea for guys is to casually ask them who their favorite sports team is at an unexpected time. They forget that you asked them, and then you can buy them whatever apparel they like best adorned with their favorite sports team name or logo.
• According to a Business Week article, the IT toys of the year are the Zhu Zhu pets. These electronic hamsters run on a track and act like real hamsters without the mess. They sell for $9.99 at Toys-R-Us and Wal-Mart as well as other general stores.
• The best gifts are the thoughtful ones that don’t have to cost a fortune. Writing a letter to each person in your family or friends, telling them what it is about them that you admire is a genuine heartfelt gift that they can cherish always and read for years to come.
• Framing a special picture of you and someone else it always appreciated, thoughtful, and inexpensive. Making a timeline collage is also fun. Start with a certain period of your lives and arrange it in a clock work like fashion.
• Or, you can always opt for the t-shirt with a picture of you on it and a caption saying, “The gift that keeps on giving”.

Hopefully this bog has, in one way or another, lifted the stress of the holidays just a little bit. From everyone at MS Companies, Happy Holidays!