Giveaway is closed.

I just realized it’s exactly one month until Christmas. Have you bought your holiday cards yet? Have you even taken the photo for it, if you do that? It’s best to do so early so there’s no rush, but if you haven’t yet, it’s not too late!

A few tips I learned when I was preparing to take our photo:

• Choose the layout of your holiday card beforehand, that way you can take a photo to fit it perfectly.
• Don’t start off the shoot offering bribes, because by the end of the shoot the kids won’t care anymore.
• Try for candid, not posed shots.
• Pretend you’re not taking photos anymore, and hold the camera away from your eye, but still pointed at your kids, and snap away! This really only works outdoors where no flash is necessary.
• If all else fails, merge individual photos of your kids into one, or choose a collage design that lets you include more than one photo.

This year, for the first time, I ordered magnetic holiday cards from MagnetStreet Baby. We included only our kids in the photo. They change so much from year to year, but everyone knows what my husband and I look like.

My girls’ faces are going to grace the doors of refrigerators all over the world! Their name may fool you, but MagnetStreet doesn’t only sell magnetic products. They also sell folded and flat linen cards, coordinating labels, and seals for most of their designs. If you can’t find just the right one for your card, they can even create one for you.

I should be getting my cards sometime this week. I’ll reveal what the photo looks like then, as well as tell you what I think about the cards themselves. I can tell you that I really enjoyed the entire ordering process. Yes, you read it right – I enjoyed it. I usually despise ordering anything photo-related because it’s quite tedious to get it looking just right. Often times you lose your entire project because you take too long to finish, or accidentally click on the wrong button. Not the case at all with MagnetStreet. The hardest part is deciding what design to choose!

It’s all quite simple. After you’ve added your chosen layout to your cart, you get to personalize it by either launching an interactive tool or filling out a form and uploading your photo. If you decide to fill out the personalization form, the MagnetStreet designers will fit your desired text and photo into the card themselves. If you choose to launch the interactive tool, like I did, you have full creative control over what your card will look like.

With the design tool you can upload photos to your gallery, edit text, and customize the colors of the card. To add the photo, you just drag it from the gallery to the card, and position it as you’d like. It tells you what the photo quality is (aim for excellent!) right away. The text editor is great. Not only can you add your own names, but you can change the card’s message, like from “Merry Christmas”, to the more politically correct “Happy Holidays”, or whatever you’d like it to be. The text’s color, size, and font are all customizable. What really impressed me is the color editor. You can change the color of almost every aspect of your chosen design, and thanks to the live preview, see it instantly change before your eyes. With MagnetStreet you can truly create a completely unique card. It’s unlike any other company I’ve ever ordered from.

MagnetStreet Baby is giving one of my readers a $100 credit towards the purchase of anything on their site. Birth announcements, holiday cards, invitations, labels and seals – the choice is yours.

All you have to do is visit MagnetStreet Baby, take some time to look around, and leave a comment here letting me know what you think you would buy with the $100.

For extra entries:

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Please leave a separate comment for each entry. If you don’t have a blog, don’t fret – you can also get an extra entry by sharing this post. Just email it to three of your friends and CC me in the email: mariana[at]ridingwithnohands.com

US entries only. Please leave a valid email address or blog URL in your comment. This contests ends at 11:59 pm EST on December 4th, 2008. Winners will be chosen via random.org, and have 24 hours to claim their prize.