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Just in time for the Christmas shopping season, ShopOnline2Give has been completely updated and refreshed. You’ll find a number of new stores here in many categories. Shop to your heart’s content with the assurance that you’re buying from the top online vendors. And don’t forget our special link to Amazon.com. It’s on a page all by itself. You can access it through the Amazon menu link near the top of the page.

Thank you for using ShopOnline2Give for your online shopping. At least 50% of the commission earned by clicking through to your favorite stores from this site go to the ministry of your choice from the column on the left.

Wishing you a joyous and blessed Christmas holiday season.

Phil Hovatter
Webmaster

Most people arrive at an age in their life where practi­cality takes prece­dence over appear­ances. We get to the point where we do what works for us, what solves our problems, regardless of how it looks.

I’ve reached that point. I’ve crossed the line. I’ve started carrying a “man bag.”

So here’s the deal. Over time, my pants pockets have become over-burdened with stuff. I cram a wallet, car keys, a cell phone, spare change, and any number of other items (breath mints, Kleenex, business cards, and so on) in my pants. I started to feel like a pack mule — a pack mule with droopy drawers. Let’s not forget the other things that I carry (or want to carry) that don’t fit in pants pockets. I don’t go anywhere without either my Kindle or Kobo ebook readers (both available here at ShopOnline2Give from Amazon or Borders, respec­tively). And it’s nice to have an ink pen or two with you, too. There had to be a better way.

Enter the Man Bag. I spent much of the past summer watching several series of “24” on Netflix (now available on ShopOnline in the Enter­tainment section). I watched Jack Bauer save the world over and over again, all while carrying a messenger bag. He stylishly lugged all the stuff he needed while maintaining his manly demeanor. Sure, Jack usually packed a Sig Sauer 9 millimeter in his bag instead of an ebook reader, but I knew I could pull it off, too. Jack Bauer gave me the confi­dence that I could carry a man bag without sacri­ficing my testosterone.

Once I had crossed that line I knew exactly where I had to go to find the perfect man bag. My choice was eBags, a great store that you’ll find in the Clothing & Acces­sories section of each shopping page on ShopOnline. I had gone to them once before when I was in the market for a laptop bag that could accom­modate a 17″ laptop, so I knew their selection of bags of all kinds was second to none. Whether you’re shopping for a backpack, luggage, purse, duffel, or gadget bag of any kind, eBags is the place to go.

eBags’ site is easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for. They have a menu bar along the top of each page and a navigation panel in the left column that lists all their major categories of bags. I clicked on “Messenger Bags” and found literally hundreds of options. But eBags’ sub-menus made it easy to narrow my search of messenger bags to canvas bags, leather bags, bags on sale, vertical bags, man bags, and so forth. I made a beeline for the manly bags.

After consid­erable comparison shopping and agonizing, I decided on a Case Logic model TK Messenger Bag. It looked like it had every­thing I could possibly need and was discounted to only $21 (with an online coupon code that gave me 25% off at checkout time) and a shipping fee of only $4.95. This was a price point that took the pain out of taking the plunge. It arrived via FedEx and I was surprised to see how large it was. It could easily fit my wife’s 15″ laptop and a whole bunch of other stuff.  I tried it out for a week and decided that while I liked having empty pockets and having every­thing I need in one conve­nient place, it was just too big. I felt obligated to put more stuff in it than just my Kindle and pocket clutter to justify carrying it. It was great for carrying to church, where I wanted to take a Bible and notebook and other special stuff, but for the day-to-day pocket emptier, it was too much. But I knew that eBags was still the place to find what I knew I really needed.

On my second foray into eBags, I decided to enter a search term into their search box on their home page. The biggest item I wanted to carry on a routine basis was my Kindle and I found a section for” iPad and ereader cases.” That’s what I’m talking about! I sorted by price, from lowest to highest, and found what I was looking for right away. Again, it was a product by Case Logic (I like their gadget bags) and it was consid­erably smaller than Man Bag 1.0 (aka the “Big Man”). Instead of fitting a 15″ laptop, this one was designed for a 10″ netbook. Just right! It fit my Kindle easily (and my Kobo, too) and still had room for my wallet, keys, hospital security badge, pens, etc. This was Man Bag 2.0, or the “Little Man.” Again using the 25% discount code (enter LINK25OFF1 on the checkout page to get this discount, good throughout the month of November 2010), I got it for just $12 plus a $4.95 shipping fee.

With both orders the product arrived in seven days. Surpris­ingly, eBags paid for FedEx Saturday delivery to get them to me by their projected delivery dates. For just a $4.95 shipping fee, I was favorably impressed.

eBags is always running a variety of sales and frequently has discount codes available. If you’re a person who buys a lot of bags, you can join eBags’ Rewards Program and earn points equal to 5% of every order you place, good for discounts on a future order. They also have an e-newsletter that will keep you advised of sales and special promo­tions. For price, selection, and customer service, eBags is first rate. Highly recommended.

The AeroG­arden is an indoor, compact, self-contained hydro­ponic gardening system. They come in a variety of sizes and colors with prices starting at only $49, including free shipping. They call it a “kitchen garden” because it can easily fit on most people’s kitchen counter tops or any small space, allowing you to grow fresh vegetables, herbs, or flowers all year long.

Ever since we first saw this product adver­tised, Sandy and I have wanted one. We finally took the plunge when Sandy saw a good sale price on one of their models. If you’re inter­ested in this product, visit their site every week to shop for sales. AeroG­arden looks for any excuse to run a sale. (Don’t forget to jump there each time from your favorite ministry’s shopping page on ShopOnline2Give.)

The sale that Sandy found was so good that she bought two units, both of them the AeroG­arden Space­Saver 6 model, in an appro­pri­ately space-age silver color. Both came with a Gourmet Herbs seed pod set (a combi­nation of basil, thyme, oregano, dill, mint and chives). She also wanted to grow salad greens, so she ordered one of those seed pod sets separately.

Assembly and planting of our new AeroG­a­rdens was a snap. The whole process took just a few minutes. Then the waiting began…

Fortu­nately, we didn’t have to wait long. Within just a couple of days the salad greens started to sprout. We were advised in the planting kit that the herbs are slower growing and would take longer, and we’ve found that to be true. It’s been a real hoot for us to check our gardens every day to see how much they’ve grown. The salad greens literally doubled in size every day for several days in a row!

Mainte­nance is a piece of cake. The units we bought have sensors that tell us when to add nutrients and water, but even if you buy models that don’t feature this, all you do is remember to add nutrients every two weeks and water as needed. The nutrients are provided with your kit, either as tablets or packets of liquid.

Yesterday, less than four weeks from planting day, we enjoyed our first harvest of salad greens. Instruc­tions advise never harvesting more than one-third of the growth at a time. Our first harvest provided enough lettuce for a huge dinner salad for both of us. Today we’re having spaghetti for lunch, seasoned with fresh basil from our herb garden. (See our photo below.)

Like I said earlier, AeroG­a­rdens come in a wide variety of sizes and config­u­ra­tions, ranging from 3-pod models to extra-tall 7-pod units. They offer lots of seed pods for each type of unit allowing you to grow many different types of herbs; vegetables such as cherry or heirloom tomatoes, green beans, different kinds of peppers; and several kinds of flowers. They even have a pod set for growing your own tea plants! What’s more, they have kits for using your AeroG­arden to start seedlings for trans­planting to your outdoor garden.

We’ve been thrilled with our AeroG­a­rdens. They are ideal for apartment dwellers, families with kids, classroom projects or home schoolers, shut-ins, dorm rooms, or anyone who’s become convinced that they don’t have a green thumb but want some home grown freshness in their diet. Growing some of your own food is fun and is a great idea. AeroG­arden makes it fool-proof. Highly recommended.

Seriously, folks, when you start to see Christmas decora­tions in all the stores, you can tell that Halloween can’t be far away! It used to be that retailers waited until Thanks­giving to roll out their Christmas sales, but every year it gets earlier and earlier. With nearly 130 retailers on our ShopOnline shopping pages, my email box is flooded every day with announce­ments from stores about their pre-Christmas sales that are going on right now.

I have two objec­tives with this site. The first is that I want to earn tons of commis­sions for all of my partner ministries. I want  commission checks to be rolling through here on their way to the churches, mission­aries, and ministries that we support through shopping on these pages.

But my second objective is that you, the shopper, get the absolute best deal that you can when you shop online here. I appre­ciate you using this site to help fund these ministries, and I know that the ministries themselves are praising God for the revenue that comes their way as a result of your shopping, but we all want you to not spend a penny more than you have to when you shop here, so I want to tell you about these sales.

The number of sales that are running online now are just too numerous to list. You can pretty safely assume that almost everyone is having a Christmas sale of some kind right now. The best time to shop seems to be on weekends. More stores run specials on weekends than any other time. Another way to save while you shop here is to find online discount codes, write them down, and come back to your ministry’s shopping page here at ShopOnline and use them at checkout with your retailer. You get the checkout discount, but your ministry still gets the commission from your purchases.

Here’s another smart money tip — save some of your Christmas shopping money for after Christmas. This is a lesson I have to re-learn every year. After-Christmas sales are even better than before-Christmas sales. All the retailers are looking to dump their overstocked merchandise as quickly as they can after Christmas. You can really scoop up some great deals in the couple of weeks following Christmas. We were able to give late gifts to several friends and business associates that we didn’t think we could afford to buy for at Christmas, because we got at really deep discounts by waiting a week (or two or three) after Christmas.

So if you’ve got to have the latest and greatest Christmas wish list gizmo, by all means, buy it now before the stores run out. But if you’re the kind of person who can delay grati­fi­cation (especially if delaying brings the oppor­tunity for more grati­fi­cation), here’s a bright idea for you — the Orthodox Christian church celebrates Christmas on January 6th. Not being Orthodox myself, I’ve always thought this to be strange (most likely because I’ve never heard their reason for it), but from a shopping perspective it just sounds downright smart. So buy presents for the little kids on your list so they have something they can tear open under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning, but strike a deal with the grown-ups on your shopping list to celebrate Orthodox Christmas this year — and save a pile of cash.

When I started building this site in the summer of 2009, I asked many of my friends who shop online where they shop and what they buy online. One of the most enthu­si­astic responses that I got was from Lesa who is a big fan of a particular premium tea vendor (who will remain unnamed until they agree to be listed on this site). I pushed Lesa’s “tea button” and got about an hour’s worth of infor­mation about the virtues of premium tea — not the kind of stuff you buy at the grocery store, but the really good stuff. As a result of Lesa’s passion for good tea, I signed a number of high-end tea dealers as partic­i­pating vendors for “ShopOnline.”

Your humble Webmaster fell in love with the tea sites that signed on with us and promptly placed an order with Mighty Leaf Tea for a green and white tea sampler assortment. The price for this 30-teabag assortment was $21.95, plus $7.95 for shipping and handling. With every order, Mighty Leaf lets you select two free teabags of your choice, so I received 32 teabags in seven different varieties stored in an attractive tea tin.

It was love at first sip.

The first variety I tried was Green Tea Tropical, a healthful, low-caffeine green tea infused with a melange of sweet, fruity flavors. Rocked my world. I’ve now tried all the varieties in the sample assortment, which also included Mountain Spring Jasmine, Organic Hojicha, White Orchard, and Marrakesh Mint. I have to be honest with you, some of these flavors didn’t appeal to me — until I actually tasted them. Jasmine is too floral and perfumy for me, but I like this tea in spite of that. Mint tea has never been “my cup of tea,” but I love Mighty Leaf’s Marrakesh Mint. It pleas­antly surprises me every time I taste it.

So what’s the difference between “the good stuff” and the grocery store stuff? A good tea is like a fine wine — it has lots of “complexity.” Different parts of your tongue register a rainbow of comple­mentary flavors. It’s a party in your mouth. After I’ve had a couple of cups of grocery store tea, my tongue feels like Astroturf. Not so with the good stuff. The teas I’ve tried from Mighty Leaf have a smooth, almost creamy, consis­tency. Bye-bye “turf tongue.” And the huge variety of teas available from the premium vendors offer something for every palette. I’ve now got a tea wish list as long as my arm.

Suffice it to say that I look forward to a cup or two of tea every day now. It has become my 15-minute vacation to peaceful, exotic lands.

If you did the math in your head when I laid out the price of the package that I bought, you probably came to the conclusion that I’m paying almost a dollar for each cup of tea. I’m happy to point out that you would be quite wrong! I’m a big guy and I brew a big cup of tea, about 16 ounces each. Every Mighty Leaf teabag (excuse me, they refer to them as “silken, hand-woven, biodegradable tea pouches”) is good for a minimum of two of these mega-mugs of tea, sometimes three. That cuts the price per cup to less than half of what you would have guessed at first. If you brew normal-sized cups, you might be able to get even better mileage.

Sometimes, for the third time that I use a “tea pouch,” I’ll use two of different flavors. Tonight I enjoyed a blend of Marrakesh Mint and Mountain Spring Jasmine. An outstanding pairing! As a former Diet Coke addict, I am happy to bliss­fully sip a couple of mugs of tea per day, rather than mindlessly gulp down vast quantities of unhealthy soda pop. Another of our tea vendors, Adagio Tea, charges much less for shipping and offers free shipping on orders of $50 or more, and with all of our vendors, loose tea is a more economical option than teabags.

So now I’m a premium tea convert. I recently read an interview with a man from England who was in Australia for a conference he was speaking at. The inter­viewer asked him if he would consider relocating to Oz. The Brit replied that the country was gorgeous and the weather was incredible, but he couldn’t find a decent cup of tea in the whole country. Tea was the deal breaker. I’m not that far over the edge yet, but I spend a lot of time browsing the tea site here on ShopOnline, planning my next purchase.

I encourage you to take the plunge into the world of premium teas. They make outstanding gifts (I just celebrated my spiritual birthday — 38 years as a follower of Jesus — so if any of you want to bless me with a belated birthday gift…) and they are a real treat for yourself, as well. And all of the tea vendors at ShopOnline pay a nice commission for the ministry of your choice, so place your order, brew a cup, put your feet up, and prepare to get cozy.

In order to test the links on this relatively new Web site, I’ve done a number of small sample purchases from various stores found on our church and charity partners’ pages. Up to this time, I had never personally shopped at BookCloseouts.com. Here’s my impression of their site and service.

While you won’t find the newest and hottest titles at a closeout retailer, BookCloseouts does have a nice selection of books of all types from a variety of authors, some well-known and others obscure. They typically sell their books at 50% — 70% off the full retail price, so it can be well worth your time to sift through their rapidly changing inventory to find some real bargains.

I was drawn to a sale that they were promoting at the time in their “Religion & Spiri­tu­ality” section, where they were offering books at 50% off their already deeply discounted prices. As you can guess from the name “Religion & Spiri­tu­ality,” they had all kinds of books in this section from every imaginable religious perspective, but it wasn’t hard for me to find a number of titles that captured my interest.

I placed two orders. The first was for ten copies of a small group Bible study guide on the Gospel of Luke, written by Max Lucado. List price was $8 per copy — I got them for $2 each. The second order was for four individual books, two hardbacks and two paper­backs. I got all four of them for just over $10. All books were well packaged and received in excellent condition.

I’m happy to report that BookCloseouts doesn’t inflate their shipping rates to squeeze some extra profit from each sale, like some mail-order vendors do. The set of ten Bible study guides cost $5.25 to ship, while postage on the four books that made up my second order was a little under $5.

BookCloseouts offers a number of shipping prior­ities and prices. I was in no hurry to receive my orders, so I went with the cheapest option both times. Both shipments arrived in about two weeks.

Based on my experience with BookCloseouts.com, I am happy to recommend them to discerning bargain hunters. As of this writing, they have a new sale on “Scratch & Dent” books from every category at 85% off the retail price. If you can live with a less-than-perfect volume, you can find some crazy deals on books while this offer lasts.