It’s that time of year again, and the brick and mortar stores may have beaten you to it. Are you starting up your Christmas promotions?

Brick and mortar stores are doing so already in some locations, and more will do so in the near future. It may feel early, but if you aren’t ready for Christmas now with your online business, you should be thinking about what you’re doing to make the most of the biggest shopping season of the year.

You can start by checking to see which of your shopping pages need to be updated. Are they offering current products?

Next think about what you would like to start promoting this year. Get those pages and/or sites up and running.

Don’t feel as though it’s too early. Lots of people start shopping for the holidays early. There’s no need to miss out on sales just because you feel that it’s strange to be thinking that way already.

I don’t mean for you to decorate your sites all in Christmas colors, of course. And please don’t autoplay Christmas music when people come to your site. There’s plenty of that in the malls. All you really need is to have your sites set up to make some good money for you over the holiday season.

No, I’m not working today and if your family celebrates Christmas I hope you aren’t either! I even wrote this post a few days ago!

If you’re looking for some end of the year cleanup work to do, take a look around! Come up with your own ideas and share them in the comments.

At this time of year there are many homes and neighborhoods that have gone to great pains with outdoor Christmas and other holiday decorations. Take an evening with the family and check them out.

You can stick to your local neighborhood and often see some pretty nice displays, but in many cities there will be particular neighborhoods where most of the homes go to great lengths to create amazing displays. These may be listed in the newspaper or on local websites.

If it’s cold, bundle up and maybe plan to have some hot chocolate when you get home.

Never let it be said my daughter isn’t imaginative. She’s working on her Christmas wish list already, and it was really hard keeping a straight face as she asked me how to spell various things.

Here’s what she wants so far:

1. Goldfish with everything I need to take care of it.
2. Harp
3. Baby Alive Girl
4. Cat
5. Dog
6. Lizard
7. Dress
8. Swing set
9. 2 mice in a cage
10. 2 bunnies
11. Horse
12. 200 pearls
13. Candy
14. Fairies

There’s a story behind that last one, and she means she wants real fairies, not dolls. At a Renaissance Faire back when my daughter was 4 a troll gave her an iridescent marble and told her it was a fairy egg, and to take good care of it so that it would hatch.

Obviously, it never has.

My daughter has decided that she needs some real fairies to come help her with it, so that maybe it will finally hatch. Since she can’t find any on her own, she wants them for Christmas.

Electric toothbrushes.

No, really. In the things my husband and I gave them, the electric toothbrushes were the biggest hit. Just simple ones, a blue and a pink Crayola electric toothbrush.

It was hilarious how delighted they were.

But the toothbrushes did finally get beaten out by a gift from my mother on Saturday. She gave my daughter an EyeClops BioniCam, and it was a hit all around. Even their 13 year old cousin wants one now.

They’re under $20 right now on Amazon, so a really good deal. How long that will last is up to Amazon, of course.

The kids of course wanted to use it at 400x magnification right away. Well, that’s really, REALLY hard to focus. I mean really.

My daughter was just crushed to find out that her initial images were terrible. You see, she had decided that she was going to make tons of money selling her images. Mommy’s little entrepreneur!

So I switched her on down to 100x magnification, and she’s just delighted with the results. Finding the focus there isn’t too hard, and it holds it pretty well. She still thinks she can sell the images, but that’s the kind of thing you think when you are 6 years old. She figures she can solve all our money problems by doing this. It’s really sweet.

My mother also got one for one of my other nieces who is about my daughter’s age. It was a good thing that I looked at the packaging while we were all there. These come with a 32 Meg USB key for pictures to be saved on. My brother-in-law didn’t notice it at first, stuck in the front of the box, and was grumbling about how the kids couldn’t save the pictures. I had looked at them online, and knew there was something, so I checked our box which hadn’t been opened yet, and told him where to find it.

Somehow he had mistaken it for one of the images on the box, not an actual USB key. Good thing the box hadn’t been thrown out yet.

All the kids were wanting turns. It didn’t matter that all except the 13 year old are under the 8 years of age recommended on the packaging. Once the focus is done, it’s pretty easy to show a child how to save an image. And unlike the original Eyeclops, you aren’t stuck to the television!

We haven’t even tried the movie function yet, although you can take a few seconds of movie to save on the card. Right now the kids are plenty happy just to be able to take interesting pictures.

A fun one was where my niece took a 100x image of her thumb, then washed her hands and repeated. I got to tease her about the two specks of dirt she missed in washing up. A great little lesson in how much dirt there can be on hands that looked reasonably clean.

My daughter is having to share this one with her younger brother, who is also pretty good at taking pictures with it. That’s fine with her, as he has to share his remote controlled car. Fair is fair, after all. They came to an agreement about taking turns every 10th picture taken, which has worked out so far… except for my daughter trying to insist that only 30 pictures be taken a day, and she would take the first turn. Sneaky, sneaky, but oh so cute! We’ve corrected that one, but as my son gets older he’s going to have to learn to watch out for her. She’s good at making deals like that.