December's Warm Write-Away Winner

I want to thank our sponsor, Peace Love Mom, who provided the warm prize of a thermal top from their lovely collection of graphic print shirts.

Thank you also to Robin at Pensieve who volunteered her time this month to read the 22 entries on the theme of "Keeping Warm" and picked her favorite (which also happened to be my favorite as well).

And last of all, thank you to our entrants. May you all have a wonderful holiday season.

. . . And the Grand Prize winner is:

Hart Family with Warm

Honorable Mentions:

Gaining Equilibrium with Lost and Found
Whee! All the Way Home with Keeping Warm

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Here are a list of the entries in the order they were received:

1. Raising Explorers with Keeping Warm for Winter . . . with No Heater
I took on a challenge that the author of Magic & Mayhem had given her family. How long can we go before turning on the heat? Over the weekend, she posted that her family finally gave in to the Minnesota climate and turned on their heat.

2. Tory1237 with Keeping Warm in Florida
As hard as it is to believe, I do have to keep warm in the winter time here in Florida. Each year that I am here, it feels colder and now my winter wardrobe now consists of gloves, a scarf, a hat and thermal underwear and flannels to wear to bed. The only thing I do not own is winter boots!

3. Glacier Racing with Drifting Off
Falling asleep. That is what freezing to death feels like according to the experts who evidently tell the tale from the other side. I doubt it. The times I’ve been cold enough to believe I could die, the shivers turned to racking shakes. Granules form under swollen skin like finely crushed glass in a balloon.

4. Planet Nomad with Keeping Warm
One thing I did not expect to worry about in Africa was keeping warm. My first foray onto the continent only enforced this for me. We landed in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in April 2001.

5. CommuniKATE with How a Southern California Girl Felt Warmth During Her First Maryland Winter
I was in the check-out line at the grocery store when I heard, “Oh, it’s snowing!” My body froze as I stared out the store’s front wall of windows. Indeed, fluffy, white snow was falling and starting to stick to the cars. My eyes started to well up and my heart started to race.

6. Gaining Equilibrium with Lost and Found
I have never been lost before. Disoriented, purposeless, confused, but this dark wandering feeling is new to me. A million stars smock their light across the sky, but the light is lost before it reaches us, into an infinite darkness. Shapes loom--cliffs, rocks, jutting sandstone darker than the dark enveloping us. Fourteen of us are wandering, hoping that we will find our car.

7. TJ Hirst.com with From Cold to Hot
We live in north central Minnesota or “Minne-So-Colda” as we joke, and the contrast between cold and warm is the most pronounced in my life. On the morning that I write this we felt our first round of single digits for the season. We’ll be thinking those numbers are a heat wave in a few months when we will regularly hit the double digits below zero.

8. Hart Family with Warm
I think the children were there. My memory is fuzzy, even though I have reflected on this experience many times. I am almost certain the children were there. I was eight or nine (remember, some of the details are just a little fuzzy) and we were visiting family in Utah. We lived in Arizona but we loved to visit our northerly situated family during the Christmas season.

9. Family Musings with Keeping Warm
Her hands were cold. Even the expensive, white leather gloves she kept perfectly clean couldn't keep the chill from settling into her fingers.

"Where is that man?" she muttered to no one in particular. "I've been waiting long enough."

10. Days Ease Wordlets and Craftivities with Rekindling
My fingers linger, suspended, soaking in the warmth emanating from the lapping tendrils of flames. Billowing and curling swirls of smoke escape into the frigid evening air, but in the sphere of the fire's glow, I am relaxed and venture easily into thoughts long ignored or pushed aside in the distractions of my normal every day.

11. Why Not Blog It Out with Keeping Warm--Soul Side Up
India has many winters – and many ways of keeping warm. I’ve seen red-cheeked cheeky children in the snow-capped Darjeeling hill-slopes running around with hands deep in jacket pockets sucking yak-milk toffees noisily to keep warm while returning from school.

12. Adventures in the 100 Acre Wood with Warm and Cozy
Almost fourteen years ago, Tim and I embarked on this wonderful adventure called marriage. There have been good times and rough times, and so many memories made. The adventures started from day one of our marriage.

13. It's All about the Mumple with Not by the Hair on My Chinny-Chin-Chin
So, at work, outside in the garden center, I have a spiffy toothpicks-and-saran wrap shelter for the register. The fact that they've spared 2 square feet for my fat butt is incidental. And fabulous. It's a great place to work, no really. I mean that. *snark*

14. My Round File with Ice, Ice, Baby
I have many cold stories for my years spent in Maine but the one that stands out is the Ice Storm of 1998. It stands out because all the other cold stories have one thing in common - the possibility of being warm - just GO INSIDE!

15. Divergent Pathways with Twelve Gifts: #6 ROOM in the INN (Entertaining Angels)
We arrived on the scene in Los Angeles homeless and jobless. We weren’t being utterly foolish. We had both a job and a home lined up -- managing an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley. But when we arrived in L.A. and called to pick up the key, we got the unbelievable news that they’d sold the building right out from under us while we were on our honeymoon.

16. All Stace, All the Time with Baby, It's Cold Inside!
Cold has never been an issue for me. I normally sleep with a fan blowing on me 365 days a year. I turn on my A/C in March and keep it running through October. I wear a winter coat only when we are well and truly in to the teens - and even then it just depends on the wind-chill. Hey, it happens more than you think here in North Carolina.

17. The Adventures of the Headless Family with Are You Warm?
Have you harvested? Have you eaten? Are you warm? Now this is what the LORD Almighty says: "Give careful thought to your ways. 6 You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it."

18. Whee! All the Way Home with Keeping Warm
I'm not a romantic. The fact is, my life could hardly be compared to a romance novel. My life falls more along the lines of the absurdist play The Bald Soprano: nonsensical and unscripted and bizarre.

19. Heissatopia in Egypt with I'm Cold and It's Not Even Snowing
I hate being cold; and I know what it's like to be cold, too. I remember when my family moved to Alberta, in December of all months; and I remember how excited I was to have snow that actually stuck to the ground. The excitement, however, wore off all too quickly.

20. Circles and Dots and Other Distractions with Cold Quirks
Germans have this idea that being cold leads to being sick, no matter what. I can't even tell you how many times people have commented that I wasn't wearing nylons, so I was going to get sick, or my hair was still wet and I wasn't inside, so I was going to get sick, or I'd forgotten to wear my scarf, so I was going to get sick.

21. Cultural Comparisons: An American in Germany with *Scarves*
Today I want to talk about scarves. If anyone around here is obsessed with vampires, it's Germans, as displayed by their love, or should I say need for scarves (possibly for protection against those sort that wander out of their castles in Romania). I couldn't quite figure it out. At first I thought that it was one of those cool but silly things (like a guy carrying around a ninja turtles backpack from when he was 10) when I saw guys wearing striped scarves.

22. Glacier Racing with A Different Heat
Blessed are we
that the PFD
bought a different kind of heat.

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And as for this Saturday's mini remote controlled helicopter giveaway from Horizon Hobby I'm still waiting to hear from our winner so check your inbox (and maybe your spam) to see if it was you--if the prize isn't claimed by Tuesday night I'll redraw a winner Wednesday morning.

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