Hickory Farms GIVEAWAY to kick off our Holiday Gift Guide!

Happy December, Everybody! 

How was your Thanksgiving? 

Did the leftovers hold out for a few days?  Good. Probably gone about now, right? Or this is right around the time when you are getting a little tired of good old turkey sandwiches.

As I've written here earlier, we are in the process of remodeling our whole kitchen, which means we are really short on things like, oh, I don't know, a microwave/oven/stovetop/kitchen sink these days, so we actually went over to visit the relatives and have Thanksgiving dinner.  I also went shopping on Black Friday with my Mom, at FOUR IN THE MORNING, and came out to the parking lot to find someone dinged our van and took off. *sigh*

Anyway, Mom sent me home with some sandwich fixings and pumpkin pie, thank goodness, but the Rhino, for some reason I cannot fathom, won't eat sandwiches.

Which is why I thank the heavens for Hickory Farms.

Hickory Farms has the best cheese in the world. Seriously. The Rhino goes nuts for the stuff! It's so creamy and there's all these varieties--well, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me back up.

I am extremely fortunate to be a part of the Mom Central Hickory Farms blog tour. Which means (prepare to envy me, readers) I received not one but TWO fantastic gift items from them to review:

The Perfect Picnic Basket, which is filled with Hickory Farms Summer Sausage (including turkey sausage, which I didn't even know they had!), the aforementioned creamy cheeses, crackers (these are excellent, with sesame, caraway and a touch of garlic) and two different mustards, one a little spicy and one sweet.  It also includes Melt Away Mints and Famously Thin Peanut Brittle, all beautifully wrapped up in a Peterboro Basket (one of those that has a hinge in the middle so the lid flips up on one side, which I plan to reuse for my own gift-giving or maybe just keep for myself, it's so pretty)! 

The Home for the Holidays Gift Box has Hickory Farms signature beef as well as Italian Recipe Summer Sausage. An array of 4 cheeses (The Rhino was in heaven!) and sweet hot as well as honey pineapple mustard, with those same delicious savory crackers to bring it all together.  

We've made Hickory Farms foods a regular holiday tradition in our house because we all love those cheeses (including our cat, Cheddar, also known as "The Fats" who thankfully cannot open boxes). The little strawberry candies sprinkled in the gift boxes also make a nice small indulgence for those with a sweet tooth. 

And, for your friends in the military, you'll be glad to hear that all the gifts found in the “Military Gifts” category of the Hickory Farms website (which includes the Home for the Holidays giftbox above), include free military shipping to military APO/FPO addresses, allowing our troops across the globe to enjoy the holidays in style. Yay!

You know what else, which didn't occur to me before writing this post? The packaging is eco-friendly. Really not a lot of padding, 'green' filler, the whole deal. That's a nice touch.  

And since we are starting our Cool Moms Rule Holiday Gift Guide, "ABCs and Giveaways for the Holidays!" on Friday, we're going to kick off December with a fabulous giveaway-- a Home for the Holidays Gift Box, valued at $50, to one of our readers from Hickory Farms!  

Here's how to enter:

• Head to the Hickory Farms website and tell me what your favorite product on the site is. This is required for all initial entries in the contest.

Additional Entries:

• Follow me, coolmomsrule, on Twitter.
• Tweet about this contest and link to your tweet.
• Subscribe to our feed (top left sidebar).
• Put our Holiday Gift Guide button (left) on your blog, Facebook or Twitter page and link it to cool moms rule! (FIVE extra entries!)  You can use the code under the button in the sidebar to do this if it would be easier for you. 
• Blog about this contest (FIVE extra entries!).
• That's it!  Contest ends at noon EST, December 10th, so get those entries in!

Good Luck!

I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Hickory Farms and received two signature gift boxes from Hickory Farms to thank me for taking the time to participate.