The standard rules

• Return to this entry over the course of the submission period to vote for as many entries that you felt were particularly good/moving/touching/funny/unique/interesting, but please no "Ballot box stuffing". Any double votes will be discounted.


• Votes are hidden, so you can feel free to NOT vote for your best friend. They'll never know.


• Votes for yourself will not be counted: we're playing for a prize so it's nicer to nominate someone other than yourself. :)


• Non-members can vote.

Additional "Best of" rules:

• Results will be posted on January 3rd - January 4th is the next official DITL day! You have an entire month to view and submit for the holidays and to consider your vote(s). We will post several reminders as this event draws to a close.


• Some winners have placed first more than once over the course of the year, and even though all of their winning entries will appear here to be considered and voted on, only one entry can win, (even if they received the first and second-most votes in this event!). Only the highest tally will be counted. Keep this in mind when voting and try to pick just what you feel is the best entry of a multiple-time winner.
  
  
  

  Feeling lost and confused? Here's an FAQ

  
  How to vote this round
  Winning entries are sorted by month in chronological order, each icon links back to their eligible winning entry for that week. There will be ten poll spaces at the bottom of this entry, and overflow can go into screened comments. You can vote for as many people as you want, so do not feel bound to keep it to 10 or under if you really think, say, 12 people deserve a vote.
  
  What if I'm voting for someone who has had 2/3/4/+ wins this year?
  Since the entry with the highest number of votes is the only winner, you'll probably want to chose only one entry by this person and vote for that one as a representative (don't worry, you have a month to consider which one this is). When you've decided on which was the most memorable for you, add their name into the box along with the date of the entry - a simple, short "jan 13" will suffice. Dates will be displayed above each winning icon, which are right over the voting spaces, so there's no excuse for forgetting!
  Votes for multiple-time winners where the votes are not accompanied by a date are not counted. This is because, in the end, we would have no idea which of their entries actually won - missing the whole point of the event!
  
  I'm still confused about multi-winners...
  Let's say you're voting for imbroglio, and she's won on four occasions, one of them being on a DITL for May the 8th. You like that one best, so you'd write in the polling space "imbroglio May 8", or some other readable variation. That's all there is to it.
  
  I like me best. I want to win the gift certificate.
  Unfortunately votes for yourself are not counted, but there's no rule against spamming in your own journal and telling people to come on down and vote for you - non-members can vote. The more traffic this event gets, the better (and the more accurate the voting as we'll get a much wider spread. 65 votes for first is better than 3 votes for first, second and third decided by a coin toss!).
  
  What kind of vote would be discounted?
  Votes for yourself (cheater), filling all the fields in with the same entry over and over and over again, or voting by writing in "this one" or "yes" (this happens in almost every voting round and is very confusing - please don't do this).
  
  I have a suggestion for how to shake things up next year, how can I go about sharing that?
  You can leave it in this entry and it will be unscreened for discussion with other members (unless you specifically request otherwise). Please mark the subject "suggestion". If you want to speak privately to a mod, follow the instructions at ditlmods.
  
  Any other questions, comments or concerns can be answered in comment form here, or more privately at ditlmods.
  
  ( And the entries... )

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/honeyandjam/kutd/~3/d-gDDboo1ao/ive-been-thinking-lot-about-traditions.html

I’ve been thinking a lot about traditions and family lately. This always comes to mind during the holiday season. You see, I don’t have a lot of extended family. It’s just my parents, siblings and I. I’ve never had big family dinners to go to, Christmas time isn’t filled with traveling and visiting. I’ve never woken up on Christmas morning to my grandmothers signature breakfast, or made my great aunts famous sugar cookies. I don’t have recipe books filled with page after tattered page of age old family recipes, passed down through the generations.

Sometimes I wish I did. I think, wouldn’t it be great to sit around a table, surrounded by grandparents, aunt, uncles and cousins? It would, of course, but that’s just not the hand I was dealt in life.

I was given an amazing, loving family though. I was placed here on purpose. I live in this house full of laughter and singing. Our Christmas mornings are small and happy, filled with smiles and thanks. We make our own traditions, like our silly gingerbread houses, handmade ornaments and my brothers goofy santa hat, and although they aren’t decades old, they mean something to us. And that’s what matters, right? So, although there’s a part of me that longs for a huge extended family and the traditions that come with that, I remind myself that it’s what you do have that counts, and I’m beyond blessed.