There’s sales everywhere – and competitions everywhere. Euromillions claim they’ll create a few more millionaires before Christmas, and it’s all well and good, but I never win competitions, so I’m not holding out much hope.

So instead I thought I’d do a piece on places I spot bargains, that kind of thing.

There’s a few blogs I follow – and have recently found Playpennies which is a brilliant site – somewhere with so many posts about things I never realised I needed until I read them! Need a hooded towel for your little one? Why pay more when you can get decent character ones from Play.com? See, I’d never have thought of looking there and would have forked out twice as much. Add it to your rss reader/subscriber thing, you wont regret it – they’ve done all the hard work to make it easier for you.

When I hurt my back earlier this year I had many days lying in bed recouperating – and with that discovered Lidl Photos. Some people might get a bit sniffy about Lidl, but actually compared to some Photobox or Snapfish photos I’ve had printed, the Lidl ones have been by far the superior quality. There’s been a deal to get a free photo book on there for a few months now, though sadly not Mac compatible (so that counts me out).

Vistaprint have been offering bazillions of free things as I’d ordered up some business cards from there, with just shipping costs on top (at £3ish). I got 10 photo Christmas Cards from them at no cost – considering when I did them in H’s first year they cost £25 with shipping on top via another high profile photo company, I’ve saved a packet. I’ve had a few things where hidden charges creep in, so be aware.

The Book People keep coming to my husband’s work and I keep making him buy things for H, such is their fabulously wide selection of books – then they really taunt me by turning up at a local fair – we love The Book People, H’s current Meg and Mog obsession (and with it a baby octopus one) stems from the six titles in a bag they’re currently doing.

Finally, if you’re like me and horribly disorganised, then you’ll not have a Christmas Cake sorted yet. Fear not, as Delia’s make your own at Waitrose has been reduced to just £5 in-store – although on seeing the ingredients in sachets, I do kind of wonder if I could have done it myself? Naaah, far too lazy. There’ll be a feature on the making of the cake to follow… once we’ve bought the extra bits we need. I think we’ll probably skip the icing and just have fruit cake…

Poundland has been great with our Christmas preparations, it seemed to be the only place which did glitter (shame on you WHSmiths!), and had stick on snowflakes for the windows which are pretty cool. I also got a large Christmas Stocking for H to put under the tree (it had a plastic window on the front which I picked off), which we may well fill up with fruit next Saturday… worth checking anyway, if you haven’t already!

That’s all for this time….