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Merry Christmas from Julie, me and Desert Island Foods®.com! I hope you have a safe, relaxed and meaningful holiday. Whatever you celebrate, we wish you the very best. We're hitting the road today to visit family, so as always, orders won't ship again after today until after the first of the year. Thanks for a surprisingly good Christmas season, considering our stripped down product mix this year, fortunately everyone still loves Survival Spice®!!! I hope you're using it on your turkey or ham this year.

Email me pictures of your Christmas culinary creations, if you'd like to share.

If you've ended up here after following any of the Desert Island Foods.com links, we've begun a long process of revamping the Desert Island Foods website. Although it's only 5 years old, that's a lifetime in terms of technology. Our venerable Storefront platform is no longer being supported, and with the changes I've wanted to make as far as what you see and the way the site works, it just was time to make the change.

It's been a goal of mine for a long time to have a more unified and seamless look to what used to be 2 websites smashed together, and the best ecommerce package and the best blogging package that were available 5 years ago just didn't play well together, but we've gritted our teeth to get through it until now.

What really brought this to a head is the other big news- Julie and I are beginning a cross-country move back to the Midwest. During this transition, the only product that will be available is Survival Spice®, which you can purchase by clicking on the links in the left sidebar. To help celebrate the change, I've lowered the price- $4.99 for individual tins, and just $24.99 for a six pack. PayPal is handling the merchant account, but you don't need a PayPal account to order- the credit card you've always used will work just fine!

There are a few kinks to work out, but we'll get them resolved quickly. Thanks so much for your patronage over the years, we love our customers!

We have a major design of the Desert Island Foods site, along with TPC coming over the next few weeks, so it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while. Hang in there, I have the back end software for the new blog loaded already, which will have more groovy features to play with.

If you don't get the DIF newsletter, you're missing out on some great deals! Our two for one Survival Spice® has been extended until Feb. 28th, thanks to a Steelers win.

What a game! The newsletter is below the fold, email me if you'd like to be added to the mailing list.

Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks giving food gifts is a fine idea:

Tis the season of food, giving and eating it, according to a report by The NPD Group, a leading market research company. According to the Christmas Holiday Profile Report, which is based on NPD's SnackTrack®, a monitor of in-home and away-from-home snack food consumption, 52 percent of consumers who report giving gifts at Christmas, give food.

The report finds that half of the food given as Christmas gifts is candy, mostly chocolate candy. Cookies are also a popular Christmas gift, 42 percent report giving cookies. An assortment of other foods, meat, breads, fruits, jams, seafood, etc. are given by 23 percent of the respondents. Sixty-three percent report that the food they gift has a holiday theme or package.

Survival Spice® is a great gift, any time of year! If it's getting near Christmas gift crunch time, why not order a few six packs for last minute gifts? Our gift baskets are a really great gift for a foodie in your life, too!

As promised, Chilebrown has posted his account of our get together last week here. We had a great time, plus Chile gives a full recounting of their adventure, and shares a picture of the two of us. BTW, the story of the Kraft vintage 1978 pasta box is right here.

I never post personal stuff I was almost to our meeting place before I realized that they would have absolutely no idea of what I looked like. Fortunately I recognized them right away, and a really memorable and all too short evening followed.

I hope we get to do it again soon!

Chilebrown sent along a picture of his wife and her friend taken at a chile cookoff they recently entered. "Mrs. Goofy" is sporting our stylish Desert Island Foods® apron for the world to see.

They're only $15.99 for an all cotton, Teflon® impregnated apron with our snazzy logo on it. Super comfortable, too.

I'm really looking forward to having dinner with the Dynamic Duo next week. We'll see how much energy they have after a 12 hour drive!

Just to keep this fresh in your minds, and to again ask you to let your friends, family members and co-workers know that we're supporting our troops and Operation Gratitude by offering a special product! For $7.99, you can buy two tins of Survival Spice®, normally an $11.98 value. We'll then ship, at our expense, your donated tins to Operation Gratitude to be included in the packages that they ship overseas.

You can get more information about this program here. I'll be posting reminders, but just to be certain everybody's aware of this program, I've posted an ad in the right sidebar so you can order at any time! If you would like to add this sidebar ad to your blog or website, email me and I'll get send you the image and the underlying code.

Just to summarize:

• You personally will receive no tins if you order this product, you are donating them to Operation Gratitude.
• You can certainly order our regular products to be shipped to you in the same transaction as well.
• Operation Gratitude is a 501(c)(3) organization, so your donation of $7.99 is tax deductible.
• We respect your privacy and we never share customer information, so if you would like an acknowledgment of your donation directly from Operation Gratitude, just indicate this in the "Special Instructions" box during the checkout process, and we'll forward your name and email address to Carolyn, who created this wonderful organization.
• You can donate as many tins as you like!
• If you prefer to donate cash instead, you can donate directly to Operation Gratitude by visiting their website.

Whatever your politics, our troops are overseas, and sadly will be there for some time yet. Operation Gratitude's collections for the big holiday shipments will begin in a few months, and their goal is to put together at least 70,000 packages on their next drive. I'd like to include a tin of Survival Spice™ in every one, but until we can afford to do it on our own, I need your help!

(Maybe I can get a gig with ZZ Top after the holiday rush...)

Merry Christmas from Julie, me and Desert Island Foods®.com! Thanks for all your support over the last year, especially with my sketchy blogging schedule. That's definitely on my list of New Year's resolutions.

Email me pictures of what you've been eating, if you'd like to share, we love getting pictures from you, even if you're not using one of our great products, but we love it a little more when you are!

Thanks again, and whatever you celebrate, I wish you the very best this time of year.

Whoo hoo!!! Tibvrtini has increased our allocation for their absolutely superb Novello olive oil.

This is the first pressing of the finest organic olives from a family farm outside of Rome, bottled and shipped immediately. A truly special offering that only comes once a year. It's one of the nicest gifts you could ever give someone who appreciates the best in food.

The price has gone up since last year- the rising Euro vs. the dollar being the main culprit- but it's SO worth it.

Order now! So far most of the people that ordered last year are doubling their orders, so it will go fast.