Today I am doing my annual What I Got For Christmas blog post, insert usual not bragging disclaimer here lol.
This year I was quiet spoiled on what I received, which is so funny because I actually told my family not to get me anything, as I prefer to give gifts, but it was so nice to receive some gifts as well.
I also received this AMAZING laptop case, unfortunately it won't actually be delivered until Tuesday, but how georgeous is this? It's from Etsy and they have so many different kinds to choose from, they also have matching iPhone & iPad cases, so I know what I want for Valentines day lol.
And that is everything I got this year, if you'd like to watch the video for this I will add it below.
I also want to say thank you to all of you who have supported me this year. It means so much to me, and never be afraid to comment or tweet any questions or chitchats you want, I try to make a point of responding to everyone I can, and love hearing form you all.
I'll be taking this week off but I will be back in full swing next week or next year lol.
My husband and I both grew up in lower income families, which is why giving back is so important to us. We give year round, and we have two sponsored children overseas, but I always feel we should do more, especially at Christmas time. So this year I have decided that rather than donating 3 or 4 toys to Toys For Tots, I want to donate $600. That's enough money to bring a gift to over 40 children, who will otherwise go without on Christmas morning.
I chose Toys For Tots for exactly 1 reason, I was that child, my siblings were that child. Had it not been for the wonderful generosity of so many there would have been a few Christmases without a gift under the tree.
I am raising the money through YouCaring as they don't take a percentage, like so many other sites do. So please if you have $100, $20, $5, or even $1, please take a moment to donate. I can tell you from personal experience how amazing it is to wake up to something, when you were expecting nothing.
Nothing in life beats slipping into a hot bath infused with sweet smelling almond, fizzing with a bit of citrus, and bubbling over with a bit of lavender, which is why one the best best parts of Christmas is seeing all the wonderful bath items Lush comes out with.
Sadly Lush items don't ship as well as one would hope so today's Lush Haul video has quite a bit of powder being flung about, however it smelt lovely as it was covering my hands and floor.
On Matthew's last night here we stayed up late talking and building Starbucks gingerbread houses. We happened to stumble upon these kits at our local Starbucks and thought it was a fun twist on the traditional gingerbread house.
This one here is mine, it looks a little shanty, not nearly as good as on the box, but one thing I learned whilst building this, is it never comes out as good as the box. The people that that build the stock image ones must use tweezers and spend days perfecting it.
This one here is Matthew's, he worked so hard on his, and had so much trouble with his cover, but he still had a ton of fun, and it was great bonding time for us. Sadly after this picture was taken the cover over the door fell off, it was top heavy with snow lol.
If you want to see a quick video of us building these and find out who won the Clinique Le Look Trio click here. You can also watch Vlogmas Day 2 here.
The other day Matthew and I sat down and filmed our top 5 favorite Christmas films. It was fitting that I would sit down to edit that video today, as he left late last night, and it's the first time in a month that I woke up without him here.
Matthew's:
The Grinch
The Polar Express
Elf
A Christmas Carole
Katie's:
The Santa Clause
The Family Stone
Little Woman
Love Actually
To find out our 5th movie, and to see who won the GlamGlow Giveaway click here, and here is today's Vlogmas.
One of my favorite things to do this time of year is watch gift guides on YouTube, however I have noticed lately that some of the bigger YouTubers are recommending a few items that would literally feed a family for a month. I missed the days of the budget gift guides, but I also understand each person has a different budget, so I decided to do a combo gift guide, some cheaper items, and some expensive items.
These are amazing they look like little mini candles, they keep your car smelling great (I also use them in my bathrooms), and they don't actually melt, which was a pleasant surprise.
This is the Balsam & Cedar which is hanging in my fake Christmas tree to make it smell real lol.
Bath & Body Works has always had the cutest candle holders, this one is a fall pumpkin and leaf holder, but they have a ton of holiday and winter ones available now.
Of course if you buy a holder you will be in need of a candle, which Bath & Body Works is famous for, if you do buy a candle first look in their offer sections, they tend to do 2 for $22 or buy 2 get 3.
I personally use this bag as my "everyday" bag, it's so nice to run to the store with something that holds my phone, keys, and card holder, rather than a giant handbag, that after awhile can get in the way.
This kit is an amazing gift for the beauty lover in your life, it will give them everything they need to do their "face" makeup, it has two foundations (one with SPF), a transparent powder, a bronzer, a primer, and a brush. It also comes in this awesome zip case so nothing gets flung around and lost.
This is the one thing in my house that I would grab incase of fire, (my dogs would be in my husbands hands of course), it contains all of my family photos, blogging photos, blog templets, and youtube videos. I also love that it's gold, though I would have loved it more if it was rose-gold lol. Also for any of you that has the new MacBook Pro, it is USB-C! They also have a 1 TB and a 4TB in silver.
The wireless beats are always a trusted gift, no matter who you hand these to, they will love them. I especially love that they can be corded if you want them to be, so if you're in the middle of a movie, or on a plane and they die, just plug in the cord and keep going.
The Dyson Hair Dryer is probably the hottest thing on the market right now, and for good reason, it cuts your dry time in half, it can be completely heatless, and the design is pretty awesome. It is a bit pricy, but I can attest it is well worth it.
If you want to see the video for this and the winners of the Coach Handbag, Tanya Burr Advent Calendar, and the Tangle Teezer you can watch it here. You can also watch the vlog here.
Typically when I sit down to write my favorites posts, I tend to feel a bit down, and I wonder how did the month go by so fast, did I even accomplish anything this month, but not November, NEVER in November. I'm just so excited to be rolling into Christmas, that I honestly could say goodbye to November without a second glance lol. Before we do that though, lets go through a few of my favorite things this month.
As you can see I had some fun taking my favorites pictures in front of my Christmas tree, I know they're not as bright as they should be, but I feel like they're so warm it fits into this time of year, when we all want to cozy up and enjoy a good book.
One of my favorite things about the month of December is Advent Calendars, how can anyone not love a little box that gives you a little chocolate or present everyday?
I don't think I went as craycray as I did last year, but I still have a very nice selection to open throughout the month. Also quick self-promo I will be opening these everyday on my vlogmas videos!
My first calendar was lovingly made by my little brother Matthew, I love how he placed it under the tree as it really fills the void that was there. I also love that I have no clue whats in there or what categories it would be; chocolate, beauty, stationary..who knows!
The LookFantastic Beauty Secret is my big beauty calendar this year, one of my fav things about this is the rose-gold box, I can't wait to reuse this at the end of the month! Also I love that they didn't tell anyone whats inside, also do you spot the cheeky "25" door? How awesome is that?
The Tanya Burr calendar is not only super cute, but I am super excited to know whats in there, as you guys know I tried the TB Cometics back when they first launched and wasn't a massive fan, but after recently trying her new products, I see how much better the quality is, and I love them. This is only 12 days, which normally I don't like but for the price I can deal with it.
Over the past 6 months I have become a massive Zotter Chocolate addict, (my neighbor is the distributor for the state of Hawaii, and he feeds my addiction on the regular lol), this cute Advent Calendar contains 24 of their Christmas chocolates, and the best part, everyday is a different flavor. If you haven't tried the Zotter Chocolates I suggest getting your hands on a few, they are amazing, and I now see what people mean when they say European chocolate is better.
And finally I have the SacconeJoly Advent Calendar, I had a sneaky suspicion that they were bringing one out this year, and as soon as they launched I bought mine. I am really excited to see whats behind each door, and to find all the characters on the front. Now I will admit this is 100% just an excuse to buy chocolate; but I like to purchase some of the YouTuber's merchandise as they take a lot of time to create entertainment for us, and as someone who does YouTube, I can tell you they don't get paid what they should. So anytime I can support some of my favorite creators off the YouTube platform I do.
So that is my 2016 Advent Roundup, are you doing Advent this year? Which one of these looks the best to you?
Today is Thanksgiving day for me, (even though it's just a regular ol Monday for you lol), I'm especially excited because my mom and brother are here for it!
For breakfast I had a dragon fruit, these are some of my favorite fruits, this one is a white one, they also have pink, and a deep red. I enjoyed this with a cup of holiday coffee from Nespresso, which tastes just like berries, and a glass of water.
I was so busy trying to get everything ready for dinner that I didn't really have time to eat so I had a blackberry greek yogurt and a Nature Valley Fruit & Nut Bar.
This Thanksgiving I decided to try and do an English style roast, it was not as easy as I thought it would be, especially the yorkshire pudding, mine didn't rise like they were supposed to and were sadly very disappointing.
For dessert we had pumpkin pie and strawberry-rhubarb pie, both were amazing.
With Thanksgiving now behind us, it is officially the most wonderful time of the year!!!! I cannot tell you how much I have been looking forward to Christmas this year, I mean lets be honest I look forward to it every year, but 2016 was not the "it" year I had envisioned it would be, so I feel like "yes, it's finally my time, and everything its going to be AMAZING!".
If your a long time follower you know that leads us to the 25 Days of Christmas Giveaway eek!
If you're new here, then welcome, and you arrived at the perfect time because starting on December 1, 2016 going to December 25, 2016 I will be giving away goodies everyday!
Now there is something thats changing, as most of you know, I used to give away 25 items on the first day, 24 items on the 2 day, 23 items on the 3 day, and so on leading us all the way to 1 item on the 25th day, and of course they were little items like elf lip liners that were really cheap. After saying how stressful it is to try and compile 100's of packages together, all of my amazing subscribers had said they would be comfortable with my changing the giveaway to just one item each day, so thats exactly what I did this year. However, due to that change the value of the items being given away has significantly increased, no elf lip liners here lol.
If your curious as to whats being given away, I have casually been filling my instagram with the items through the month of november, there are a few items that haven't been included in there so I will go ahead and add a collage below the giveaway app, you can also watch the video below, which will include a walk through of each item.
Now lets talk entries, it's actually super easy, all you need to do is be subscribed to my youtube channel, if you want extra entries the giveaway app has a vast variety of ways you can earn extra entries. Also it's important that when you go through the app, you have to actually subscribe and remain subscribed, as it will not collect your data for me to contact you with.
Today Matthew (my little brother), made me an advent calendar! He went to the store and with the help of my mom picked out 24 items, that he thought I would like, and built me a DIY advent calendar <3
When he had said he wanted to do an advent calendar I thought I was going to have to hang twine and buy clothes pins, but when he asked for lunch bags, (which I did not have so we made another trip to the store lol), I was really surprised by his genius, not to mention I now have 24 hand decorated little bags from him.
As a side note those bags will be placed in his artwork book.
After decorating, filling, and stapling each bag shut, he then placed them under our empty tree, it's the perfect place for them as it makes the tree look so full, but also every morning during Vlogmas, I can sit there and open a new little present, it will feel like Christmas morning everyday!
I want to say a massively big thank you to Matthew for doing this for me, it was very sweet, and as promised I will now make one for you!
And for any moms out there that want to do advent with their kids but don't want them eating chocolate every morning, hit up your local Dollar Store and make one of these, they are really cool!
Also Matthew filmed himself making the advent calendar and I have placed it on my vlog channel, so if you'd like to watch it you can find it here.
For the past month and a half I have been working on a project that includes the building of a website, the whole point of this site is to bring creators together in a way that allows big and little creators to connect and help each other out. It was supposed to be such a fun and exciting journey, instead it has been nothing short of a nightmare, it seems like every time I think I've been successful in something, ten other things go wrong.
After about 3 weeks of writing I finally finished a HUGE part of this project, I clicked print, as I wanted to have a hardcopy to have my mom check for errors, and suddenly the app I was using crashed, and has deleted everything I had written. I know what your thinking, "didn't you save it", yes I did in fact I have something set on my Mac that it saves every 5 minutes, I also use my iCloud, but for some reason the app wasn't saving or uploading to iCloud, even when I was manually saving it wasn't. I did take it to the Genius Bar at Apple, the people there were so nice and really tried to help me, they spent a long time running every program they could think of to pull up all my past used documents, but it was nowhere to be found.
This isn't just frustrating because of the fact that I have spent weeks working on this, but because I have put off so many other things like my blog and youtube channel, in fact my schedule says I'm supposed to be finished filming all of the 25 Days of Christmas videos today, but I haven't even started filming 1 of them. I have literally put my life on hold for this, and now I'm not only missing over 40 pages of extremely well thought out content, but I'm also drastically behind on everything else.
Having said that I am choosing to persevere, I will spend my nights writing and my days filming back to back videos, and hopefully I will be done by the first. The most frustrating part of all of this was I had everything planned out so I would be able to enjoy the holiday season with my family, without worrying about filming or editing, or writing, but here I am a week and a half before the first with literally nothing.
Anyhoos I just felt like writing this down, hopefully now that I have I can move past it and get down to work.
Thank you for listening to my frustrations, and hopefully next week will be better!
The very first Beauty Guru I ever watched on YouTube was Tanya Burr, I can't remember her exact subscriber count at the time, mostly because I had no idea what it really was or meant, but I do remember she only had about 10-20 videos on her channel, and the first one I watched was the Blake Lively from Gossip Girl tutorial, I instantly fell in love, Tanya reminded me so much of myself, and I watched every single one of her videos that day. About a year went by and she had uploaded a tutorial on something and she used a product, which I can't remember what it was, and I had seen a lot of the Beauty Guru's using it, so I asked in the comments if she would do a review, I got so many people saying , "yes, please do!", but she never did it, so after about 3 months I went out, bought it myself, and uploaded my very first video!
Since then I have had so much fun making videos and writing my blog posts, I know I slack off from time to time but I do still have a business to run, and sometimes that has to take priority, however I am feeling rededicated to uploading and blogging again, which works out perfectly because in 2 weeks starts the 25 Days of Christmas Giveaway!!!
I want to say thank you so much for all your love and support on my blog and youtube channel, and thank you for your understanding when I do slack off, so as a way of saying this Thank You I am giving away this really cute Coach Crosby 24 Carryall Leather Satchel.
The winner of this giveaway will be announced on December 1, 2016 along with the monthly giveaway, and to be entered it's really easy you just have to be subscribed to my YouTube channel, as always you can earn extra entries by going through the form below and following my here on my blog and my social media.
Again I just want to say thank you so much , this means the world to me, and the fact that it's happening just be for the holidays get into full swing is just icing on the cake!
Here is the video showing off the bag, unfortunately it's not available at Nordstrom anymore, but I did keep the tags on so you can see it's authentic!
Today's Throw Back Thursday post goes back to when I was 10/11 years old, this is when my whole family (aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, parents, and siblings), all lived in one big house.
It was absolutely incredible, we had so many people to play with, we would sneak into each others rooms at night and tell scary stories, and we always had someone else around to blame things on.
I will name everyone in this picture from left to right so bear with me:
I think this picture was taken on Tj's birthday, only he and Derrell could have been celebrating their birthdays, and the gifts look to "Big Boy" for him.
Today Matthew and I decided to make cupcakes, but we didn't want your normal run of the mill cupcakes, we wanted something that would be a bit different, but still have that Fall feel to it, which is how we stumbled upon the Candied Yam Cupcake in my cupcake book.
This seemed like such a random cupcake, and I was a bit nervous to make it, but it was amazing I would highly recommend it, and it would make a great dessert on Thanksgiving.
For The Cupcakes:
1/2 Cup Butter
1/2 Cup Packed Brown Sugar
1/2 Granulated Sugar
1 Egg + 1 Egg Yolk (save the white for frosting)
1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1/2 Cup Pureed Sweet Potato (I used the canned)
1 1/3 Cup All Purpose Flour
3/4 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1/4 Teaspoon Baking Sode
1/4 Teaspoon Salt
1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Nutmeg
1/4 Cup Milk (I used unsweetened almond)
Preheat your even to 350 degree, and line your muffin pan with cupcake liners.
In your mixer add the Butter, Brown Sugar, and Granulated Sugar and cream together until it becomes paste like.
Add in the Egg, Yolk, Vanilla, and Sweet Potato.
In a separate bowl mix all the dry ingredients together.
With your mixer on the lowest setting add in 1/2 the Flour Mixture, slowly.
Then add in 1/2 your Milk.
Then add in the other half of your Flour Mixture.
And finally the other half of your Milk.
After everything is mixed well, spoon into your cupcake liners and place in the oven for 20-22 minutes.
For the Frosting:
1 Cup Packed Brown Sugar
1/2 Granulated Sugar
1/3 Cup Cold Water
1/4 Mini Marshmallows
1 Egg White
1 Heavy Pinch Cream of Tartar
1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
Hazel Nuts (for topping)
Mini Marshmallows (for topping)
Place the Brown Sugar, Granulated Sugar, and Water in a sauce pan and stir, then when everything is fully moistened place on medium heat.
While that is cooking place your Egg White and Cream of Tartar in your mixer, with your whisk attachment, and whip until heavy peaks form.
Once the sugar disolves and the mixture starts to come to a very low boil, remove from heat and add in your 1/4 Cup Mini Marshmallows, and stir.
After the Marshmallows have dissolved VERY SLOWLY pour the mixture into your Egg White, you should do just a couple of tablespoons at a time so it doesn't flatten your white. This should be happening whilst your mixer is on medium-high speed.
Whip until the frosting begins to hold it's shape, then add in the Vanilla and whip for an addition 3 minutes.
Frost your cupcakes immediately as this will set up rather quickly.
Decorate your cupcakes with Marshmallows and nuts, then sprinkle a dash of cinnamon as to give the toasted marshmallow look.
Matthew and I had a ton of fun making these, and the frosting literally tastes like marshmallows, while the cupcake has almost like a moist banana bread taste to it.
Tag me on Twitter and Instagram if you make these, and also leave any questions you have on the recipe below, and I'll get back to you as quickly as I can.
You can watch the video for this here, pay attention to the pouring of the Sugar/Marshmallow mixture.
Today I started off with a big-ol cup of water, my normal coffee, and a protein shake. This protein shake is incredible, its made with Dutch Chocolate protein powder from Melaleuca, then I added in 1 banana, a bit of frozen tropical fruit mix, 1 scoop of the Vida Glow original, and 1 cup of almond milk, then blend and you have a milk shake for breakfast!
Lunch:
For lunch I had a bit of the Costco chicken noodle soup, their noodles are the homemade ones and they taste so good.
I also had a few green grapes for a snack but forgot to take a picture.
Dinner:
And then I had the exact same thing for dinner lol. I don't know why I didn't have a salad or something but I was tired after working all day, and saw the soup and dove straight in.
Dessert:
Today Matthew and I spent a lot of time filming our Candied Yam Cupcakes for a thanksgiving video!!! I ate mine with a TeaPigs peppermint and licorice tea, and let me tell you, these cupcakes were AMAZING!!!! They were so moist and the frosting tasted just like marshmallows!
The video for the cupcakes will be up here on Wednesday so check back soon!
That is everything I had today, what did you enjoy for your meals?
