Of all the celebrations we have this holiday season, I am most looking forward to getting together with friends. Why? Well we have awesome friends but that is beside the point. We are playing Dirty Santa – a tradition that started last year and that we missed because of illness. But not this year. We will be taking vitamins and drinking orange juice so that we are all healthy and ready to party.

Dirty Santa is way better than drawing names or Secret Santa. You bring a wrapped gift to the party – then everyone draws a number. The first player can choose any gift they want. Maybe they will be drawn to the biggest or the one with the shiniest wrapping paper. They will then open their gift. Maybe they will love it or hate it. They will be lucky to make it to the end of the game with the same gift. Player two can either take player one’s gift or choose a wrapped gift. If he chooses player’s one gift, then player one chooses another gift. Play continues until everyone has gotten to choose a gift. This is where it is awesome to go last. You can choose any previously opened gift. I have been wanting to play Dirty Santa for years – so I’m really excited.

My husband has chosen his gift he will be taking. It’s OK and a pretty cool gadget so hopefully it will go over well. I’m still uncertain what to buy. It would be fantastic to choose something everyone wants but not sure that exists. Something that half of the friends would like the other half would find not so fun. They are a diverse group – so this makes it even more tough to find something that will be well received by whomever winds up with it.

I still have a few weeks – so I will just have to keep my eyes peeled for something extraordinary.

This year my husband and I are not buying each other gifts, but we are going to buy something for the whole family. We have run through a couple of scenarios from the real practical new oven to the not so practical PlayStation 3. While we do need a few larger items, right now is not a good time to buy them since they all require extra work on our part. Lately my husband has been working a lot, so home plans have been put on hold.

So with the practical gifts on the back burner, we have been exploring two options – a Kinect for the Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Now both items will be on sale Black Friday. The Kinect will be cheaper at $99 than the PlayStation 3 at $199.

We need room to play the Kinect – something we really lack. It seems that if we do buy a Kinect that our play time could be limited. With the PlayStation 3, we would also have a Blu Ray player besides a gaming system. The PS3 on sale comes with two games I have been wanting to play. I need to remind myself of when I bought a PS2 that came with a game I wanted to play. Sad to say I have yet to play that game.

If we do go the route of the PS3, then I must play the games that come with it sooner than later. Both will be a really good choice. It looks like fun will win out this Christmas.

Those little Facebook games can really suck up all of your time. I finally broke away from playing them and hopefully won’t get back into playing them again. I do enjoy casual games but prefer those that are installed on my PC.

Our hard drive crashed about a month ago, so we are working off an older one. It is missing all of our games and most of our programs. I forget how nice it is to play a game for 15 minutes during the day. Ironically it seems to help me get more work done. Playing games releases that nervous energy and anxiety. Then I can get down to work.

I may have to download a few of my favorites again. It is nice to have a break from housework that is totally mindless and isn’t as involved as television.

After weeks of searching, I found Wii Fit at our local Wal-Mart! I was so excited to get it home to play. Now I can stop looking at Ephedrasil Hardcore and other dieting pills since now I have Wii Fit.

I might have a lot of faith in Wii Fit to help me lose weight, but I do think that it can help you keep motivated. You can set goals for yourself and then everyday you can find out how close your are to it.

Wii Fit reminds me a lot of Brain Age, which I love. The toddler also loves Wii Fit and wants to play every time I do. That’s not surprising since that it was the case with the Guitar Hero guitar, the DDR dance pad, and the Rock Band drums. It would be unlike her not to want to play.

Besides from having to share my playing time, I really enjoy Wii Fit. It made those months of searching for it worthwhile.

Our next game console will be an Xbox 360 mainly because of Rock Band 2. My nephew recently got a playstation 3 that really makes my husband want one. Of course, he also wants the 360, so we’ll have to do one at a time.

There’s more out for the 360 that we want to play right now. I’m looking forward to playing Rock Band 2 and having the option for downloadable songs. We really enjoy playing video games. In fact we might play as much as we watch TV. Our Nintendo Wii is great but games definitely have a party feel to it, which I love those types of games. But sometimes it’s nice to play other games as well.

Rock Band 2 is set to be released in September, so that is when we will need to buy our Xbox 360.

For the past few weeks we cannot get our Wii to do a system update. It seems to connect to the Internet fine and proceeds to download but then stalls a few minutes into the process.

The Wii uses a WIFI connection but also has the capability of using a wired one. So I dragged out my LAN USB adapter and some extra Cat 5 cable to see if it was something to do with the wireless connection. Well, apparently I need a Wii LAN adapter to make this work. Guess it’s back to the drawing board.

Of course, my husband’s idea is to take it to a friend’s house and use their WIFI to see if it will update that way. Since we have satellite Internet we are wondering if that is the problem. I guess I need to do some further investigating. It’s very frustrating since I received Wii points for Christmas but can’t use them until the Wii does a system update.