New York Shop: Best Bets for the Whole Family is an event designed to make your  Holiday Shopping easy, fun and on budget even with kids in tow. There will be 40+ exhibitors featuring great deals on clothing, accessories, beauty products, books, toys, home décor and more - up to 60% off - creating a one-stop destination for holiday shopping.

While grownups deal-hunt, hip little ones can enjoy fun activities including cupcake decorating with FreshDirect, science experiments with apple seeds, sing-alongs with Music Together, and the opportunity to have holiday photos taken, plus appearances by Clifford the Big Red Dog and WordGirl.

Exhibitors include: american terry co., Baby Bean Vintage Daywear, dominique rouzier, DwellStudio, egg + avocado, flora and henri, Heroes Will Rise, Igloo Island, kicokids, Kiteya, Love is Organic Denim, milk on the rocks, Nest Children, Pluto, Sense of Wonder, Triple Sweet, Twinkle by Wenlan, Urban Tots, Wonderboy and many many more.

Just two days left in our week of Holiday Giveaways and we're finishing it off with a bang. For the next two days we have a huge number of tickets to some of NYC's best family events: We're giving away two family packs to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. Plus four tickets to Wintuk. Four tickets to the Big Apple Circus. And ten tickets to New York Shop, which I'll be giving away in pairs. That's nine giveaways in the next two days. That's over $1500 in prizes!

Here's the trick, the giveaways are going to start at random times and end at random times, so keep checking back to catch one. There's lots of tickets to win, so send the links to your friends and you can all go to one of these events together. You can enter as many of the guiveaways as you like and you can also win more than once.

I'll also be announcing the beginning of each giveaway on Twitter, so if you are on Twitter, follow me and you can keep tabs on the situation from there.

My son, Roan, has reached the age of forced ambivalence. I didn’t see it coming, at age four, yet here it is. When I asked him on Sunday to accompany me to a concert by the band Milkshake, he acted cavalier and stipulated that his cousin, Boone had to go as well. I invited Boone, nine years old, who is the king of cavalier. I think his mother threatened or bribed because he eventually was on board. I mention this because I did not expect these boys to dance, sing or frolic during the concert. I was wrong.

How do we accumulate so much stuff, when, I swear, we never buy anything? We do our best to follow the one-in, one-out rule. My kids are actually pretty good about giving up their old toys (they have a knack for expressing contempt and disdain for most of the things in their lives). And yet, my closets look like booby traps for unsuspecting fools who might attempt to open them. They are so packed with...I don't know what.

Cleaning up, to us, means moving everything from the surface of the place we want to be clean to some other surface that is as far from that one as possible. I dream of making it my life's work to make our home a sanctuary where every place you rest your eyes is a perfect picture of tranquility and beauty. Hahahhaha. Well, maybe in another life, the one where I'm not scrambling from one thing to the next every waking minute of the day.

But wouldn't it be nice to have someone just come in and take care of these things. Even just a little facelift before our homes are over-run and picked over by relatives over the Holidays. A little nip here and a tuck here to get our apartments organized. I Thought so.

Buying local is the hip new thing, but beyond just being trendy and "supporting local businesses," buying local is important to us because it builds community and sustains what we love most about NYC: its cool, eclectic mix of unique, small shops and walkable city streets.

There are several Holiday shopping events that make shopping locally into fun, outings. Plus we've got a round-up of sample sales.

This week to promote our Holiday Guide, we're doing a whole week of fabulous giveaways. This is by far the best line-up of giveaways we've ever done on the site, with well over $1000 in awesome prizes.

We're kicking it off with two awesome giveaways of Mattel's best selling toys for boys and girls. Each prize is worth $150. and will make you the most loved parent ever on Christmas or Chanukah. Check out what you get:

As the leftovers wind down, I once again find myself wondering why we have to wait another year for stuffing, turkey and cranberry sauce.  I mean, why can't we eat this delicious combo of food more often?  I know, I know, it's just the way it is, but even if the food is purely annual, there are some other things about Thanksgiving worth keeping.

Though I never grew up with the tradition of holding hands before a meal and taking a moment to say thanks (and probably would have thought it was totally lame as a teenager), my two year old has latched onto it and I've got to admit that I'm lovin' it.  Sometimes she says "thanks for the dark" or "thanks for animals" and each time it reminds me of how amazing it is to be a parent; which in turn brings up another thanksgiving tradition worth keeping, being thankful.

But enough of the sappy holiday stuff, posts this week include more sappy holiday stuff, like interfaith couples figuring out what to do about the tree, new news on peanut allergies, all you ever wanted to know about gestational surogacy and more.

At the zoo today my friend was telling me how her daughter is already having anxiety about Christmas being over. She said they were even thinking of celebrating Chanukah this year just to spread it out a little and avoid the whole ONE BIG DAY thing. It made me think about the genius of advent calendars for spreading out the fun of the Holidays over a longer period of time.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, the advent calendar is really a perfect thing. They are beautiful, creative and hold tiny little treats in them that get to be opened one-a-day, working up to Christmas. What could be better than that? Some people put candies or small presents in their advent calendars, but the really great thing about them is you can create your own advent calendar tradition. You can also make an advent calendar out of just about anything. I've seen some really beautiful and cool home-made advent calendars.

Here are my best ideas both for advent calendars you can make and what to put inside them: