What's been going on in my life this month and a VSS check-in

Yesterday marked exactly five months since my last birthday. It's staggering how quickly time flies, one month tumbling into the next, life a series of moments and emotions, smiles, highs, lows and memories. I'd hoped to get a new outfit post up this week, but there was no way that was going to happen as the days progressed.

This month has been - and will continue to be - staggeringly busy. The most jam packed, hectic one of 2015, topping even October, and while there will be outfit posts as the weeks progress, again, there was just no way for one to be squeezed in at present. Soon though, including a couple of stellar holiday season dresses that I can't wait to show you guys!

Since getting back from Vancouver last week, I've been crazy busy both vintage Vintage Secret Santa happenings, as well as packing up and shipping out a ton of wonderful Etsy shop orders that have been pouring in recently. I had some requests from blog readers for such to cover payday today, so I've extended the 25% off VSS coupon code there until tomorrow.

If you'd like to purchase anything for your VSS match, yourself, or someone else, you can take 25% off all orders when you use the coupon code VSS25 at checkout until December 12th.
 
Keeping pace with those happenings has been the holiday season itself, which as we all know, usually only gets busier and busier as the 25th draws nearer!

Also, before the end of the month, as a small business owner I need to file my Canadian PST and GST tax reports, which essentially means doing all of my 2015 taxes (in order to generate the precise numbers for each) this month, too. Not exactly what one wants to be dealing with for several days during Christmastime, but it must be done, so no sense in bemoaning it too much.
 
Further on top of those things - and very exciting - Tony and I recently decided that the time had come to get a new (be actually brand new or just slightly use) car. Our current one - which was actually our first car ever - was bought secondhand for a stellar deal back in early 2012 and has served us well for nearly four years now.

However, for a myriad of reasons, it's no longer the best fit for our current lifestyle (a big one being that we need a great deal more room than it provides, including for Annie, our energetic 65+ lbs dog, as well as for when we travel and for when I sell in person at vintage shows) and so this month we've been pouring our a lot of time, thought and energy into researching, test driving, and hunting for our next vehicle.

{The models – and prices! – might change, but the act of buying a car remains much the same as it did back when this photo was taken around the start of the 1950s. Vintage auto dealership image source.}

 
We haven't found "the one" yet, but we're getting closer and are both incredibly excited about this prospect. We've needed a bigger vehicle for ages and knowing that one will soon be ours is giving me some much needed pep to get through these crazy busy weeks!
 
Back, for a moment, to the VSS. For those taking part in this year's Vintage Secret Santa, 100% of the match emails were sent out to all participants by the (PST) morning hours of December 2nd. If you have not yet seen your email in your inbox (it should have been there about 1.5 weeks ago now), please check your spam (a lot of users who signed up with a Hotmail email are having their VSS messages land in their spam filters for some unknown reason - maybe Hotmail isn't in a festive mood this year ), deleted message, and archived message folders going back to November 30th.
 
If you don't see your VSS match email in any of those spots, please contact me by email right away and I get your match info out to you again. There's less than two weeks to go now until Christmas and if you signed up for the VSS, it's very important that you honour your commitment and mail out a gift to your match, who, just like yourself, is no doubt excited for, and expecting to receive, a festive gift as part of this fun online gift swap.
 
Definitely lots going on this month on our for sure, which is great! I've also been giving a lot of thought to the direction of my blog, my wardrobe, my social media accounts, and many other important aspects of my life and work as we head into 2016, so I've got oodles on my (vintage china) plate right now and am seriously excited to see how it will all play out in the coming year.
 
I hope that you're each having a terrific December and that, hopefully, yours is at least a bit less harried than mine!
 
Have an awesome weekend and countdown to Christmas, my dears!!!

Sign up for the 2nd annual Vintage Secret Santa gift exchange

Whether you're joining us for round two of this super fun online present swap for the first time or took part last year, welcome!!!

Those who took part in the inaugural Vintage Secret Santa gift exchange here last year may recognize a lot of the same points in today's post, but that's simply because they worked so well and completely apply this time around, too.

The premise of this wintertime gift exchange is very simple. One signs up, is partnered with a randomly assigned partner, your name is likewise teamed with a random match, you send out a gift (or gifts) using the details that your VSS match provided when they signed up, and you in turn receive a gift from your own "Secret Santa." That's it, easy-peasy and fun as all get out!!!

Last year's Vintage Secret Santa was a roaring success with over 270 people taking part. At least 99% of all those participated received a gift, either from their original Secret Santa or, in a small number of cases, from one of the very kind "Angel Santas" who volunteered to send a second gift out to one of the people who had failed to receive their’s from their original match (or because it was lost in the mail). Again though, for just about everybody, the VSS went smoothly and very positive experience.

I'd love to not only meet, but exceed the same number of VSS participants this time around and can't stress enough how much I encourage you to share about this awesome holiday season gift exchange anywhere and everywhere online (your blog, social media, by email, etc).






If you'd like to participate in the 2015 Vintage Secret Santa Gift exchange, here are the guidelines:

❄ Please sign up using this quick and easy participation form (your information will be kept strictly confidential, with only myself and the person who will be sending you your Secret Santa gift being privy to it).

❄ Participants may sign up to take part in this Vintage Secret Santa until Wednesday November 25, 2015. On this date, I will begin assigning swap partners and will email everyone involved with their gift recipient's name by no later than December 2, 2015 (*edit* originally we had said by Dec. 1st here in this post, but Tony's extremely busy work travel schedule, including a trip for the last several days of November has moved the final match date up a day).

❄ This Vintage Secret Santa is open to participants from around the globe. You may be assigned a recipient in your own country or elsewhere in the world, just depending on the random Vintage Secret Santa recipient that you are matched with (each participant will receive one randomly selected recipient).

❄ You do not have to observe Christmas to take part. This festive Secret Santa exchange is open to everyone regardless of their personal beliefs, faith, or any other factor. You are welcome to think of it as a nondenominational wintertime vintage gift swap, if you would prefer.

❄ Gifts (or the combined value of the gifts in your Vintage Secret Santa parcel) are encouraged to be of a value of at least $15.00 USA. There is no cap on how much you can spend, but do keep in mind that shipping costs can quickly add up when sending larger items and/or heavier parcels, especially outside of your own country, so you may want to opt for smaller sized presents if such is the case.

❄ You may mail gifts to your Vintage Secret Santa recipient from your own home or order them online and have them sent directly to the person you're giving to. This can be a great way to help cut down on shipping costs.

❄ Gifts can be handmade, store bought, or a combination of the two.

❄ Gifts are encouraged to be vintage, vintage reproduction, vintage inspired, vintage appropriate (for example, a new, unused tube of your favourite red lipstick), handmade or similar, but ultimately so long as the present(s) given is/are thoughtful and abide by the rules in the next point below, the sky is the limit.

❄ Please do not send anything live, perishable, dangerous, illegal, of an explicit nature, or which could easily be perceived as racist, sexist, frightening, or otherwise offensive.

❄ Giftees are encouraged to send their presents out before Monday, December 9, 2015 in the hope that by doing so, they will arrive by, or right around, Christmas Day. Please keep in mind that parcels sent to international destinations will most likely take longer to arrive, so posting them out ASAP is always a very good idea.

❄ By signing up to take part you acknowledge that you will do everything in your power to send out a gift to the Secret Santa name that you are partnered with. If for some reason you do not believe you will be able to do so before the deadline to mail out gifts arrives (December 9th), please contact me immediately.

❄ Use the hashtag #vintagesecretsanta when sharing about this festive gift exchange and/or the present(s) you received on your blog and/or social media.  festive

❄ If you have not received your VSS gift by January 15, 2016, please contact me on, or after, that date so that I can look into the matter for you.

❄ And last, but not least, please keep in mind that I have no control over the how quickly your VSS match mails out their present to you, if they do so at all, or the postal system itself.

Should you run into issues, I'm here to help via email in any way that I possibly can, but ultimately it is up to those taking part in the VSS to live up to their commitment to send out a present and then for the postal system to ensure that said gifts reach their destinations.

If you email me with a concern, I ask that you please be courteous and polite. Belligerence and/or abuse will not be tolerated towards myself or anyone taking part in the VSS. Thank you very much for your understanding on this front.

❄ ❄ ❄ 

That's all there is to it, my dears. It's very straightforward and tons of fun! (And of course I’ll be taking part in it myself!)

The Vintage Secret Santa is naturally open to both male and female participants and it was great to see a small handful of chaps take part last year.

If you would like to send your Vintage Secret Santa partner something from my Etsy shop, I'd be thrilled about that and will provide complimentary gift wrapping and a holiday card for your recipient (please email or Etsy private message me to let me know and I'll do just that before posting your order out).

To help you get the most bang for your shopping buck at my Etsy shop, please use the coupon code VSS25 to save 25% off on all orders (be they for the VSS or otherwise) between today and December 10, 2015.

If you're taking part, I urge you to share the link to this post (and use the cute vintage festive image above) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, your blog, or absolutely anywhere else you'd like (remember to use the hashtag #vintagesecretsanta when you do).

There's no cap on the number of people who can take part in this Secret Santa, so the more folks who hear about it, the better!

It was such a blast to unite many in the vintage community last year and I feel so honoured to get the opportunity to do so again this winter. We're a close knit group and I just love it when we can come together and brighten one another's day - or, in this case, holiday season - with kind, generous acts like sending out a festive gift to one of our peers.

I highly encourage you to sign up, send out a delightful gift, receive one in return from someone else, and have a wonderful time swapping vintage Secret Santa presents while sharing your passion for the past this holiday season!

An IMPORTANT MESSAGE to all Vintage Secret Santa participants

First and foremost, thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking part in Chronically Vintage's first annual Vintage Secret Santa gift exchange. The number of participants that poured in far exceeded my initial expectations, with the final count, landing in the 260s. What an incredible way for so many of us to come together in the spirit of the winter holidays - whichever those may be for you personally - to celebrate not just this festive time of the year, but also our mutual passion for vintage.

I'm penning this quick post this morning to cover a couple of further points as well.

First and foremost, I want to ensure that everyone has opened their Vintage Secret Santa match email at this point. We quadruple checked that everyone was sent an email, so if you signed up and haven't received/seen yours yet, please check through your spam/junk mail, deleted messages, and achieves folders going back to November 25th, which was the first day we started sending VSS match emails out (and by "we", I mean Tony and I; he has been incredibly helpful throughout this whole process, even writing the script that allowed us to quickly assign random VSS partners to one another).

It's integral to the success and spirit of this Secret Santa exchange that if you signed up, you receive/view your email and please send out a gift to the person you were partnered with. If for any reason, especially with Christmas Day so near now, if you aren't able to carry through with sending a VSS gift, please email me immediately. Likewise, if you can and still want to take part but can't seem to find your match email, again, please email me right away.

I know that if you follow Chronically Vintage on Facebook and/or Twitter, I may sound like a bit of a broken record here, but again, I really, really want to make sure that everyone both sends and receives a VSS present.

And on that note...we all know what a three ring circus of (hopefully jolly!) activity and excitement this time of the year is, so I ask one and all who are taking part to please be patient with your Santa (the person who is sending a gift to you). I'm starting to get a flurry of messages from Santas informing me that they are just now sending their gifts out, which is totally okay (I didn't set any hard and fast "mail by" dates, simply suggesting, if possible, that folks do so by December 12th) - the important thing is that they get in the mail.




{The real St. Nick might live at the North Pole, but this year over 260 Vintage Secret Santas from around the world joined together to each make this season an even more joyful another member of our fabulous online circle and the outpouring of support for this fun holiday season project, which I truly plan to make an annual event here on Chronically Vintage, has been nothing short of overwhelmingly positive. Vintage image source.}


If you're taking part in the Vintage Secret Santa and haven't received your gift by Christmas Day, please try not to worry. On top of how early or late your Santa may have sent their gift to you, most postal systems slow to the speed of molasses on ice at this time of the year and there's a very good chance that it will reach you in the last few days of December or early January.

Should you, however, have not received your gift by January 15, 2015, then by all means feel free to contact me and I'll get in touch with your Santa to ensure that they did in fact mail out your gift. Over the years I've had parcels I sent via Air Mail in early December not arrive to international locations until early February, so if you haven't received your VSS gift by then, I wouldn't give up hope entirely.

If, ultimately, your present fails to arrive for whatever reason, and we are working on the honour system here of course, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are sent a belated gift. A few incredibly kind and generous Vintage Secret Santas have informed me that they can send out a second gift (to a second "match", that is), if need be, and I want to truly thank those folks for this kindhearted offer. Ideally, I won't need to take them up on it, but if needed, I certainly will.

Thanks to the power of social media and the handy-dandy #vintagesecretsanta hashtag, we're already starting to see some people's gifts arrive and be shared on social media (chiefly Instagram and Twitter so far). If you opt to share a photo (or photos) of the gifts you're sending and/or have received, please don't forget to use that hashtag so we can all delight in viewing what we've each received as part of this awesomely fun holiday gift exchange.

Once more and with an endless amount of joy, thank you to each and every person who took part in this first Vintage Secret Santa present swap. I've (very touchingly) had several people tell me that the VSS has been the highlight of their holiday season and I know that for all of who joined in, it is undoubtedly a bright spot in our wintertime festivities this year.