New (Well Sort Of) Family Game Night Gift Baskets and more!

Here in our area of Maine, the nights are cool, the leaves are falling and it's warm by the woodstove. It's the time of year we begin thinking about the Holiday Season. We're not ready to get out the Christmas tree lights mind you, but we do begin to plan for our busy season. Shipping boxes have arrived along with bags of bows and other Gift Basket sundries.

As the official data cruncher and self-professed marketing guru for our little company, I look at numbers. Change has been in the air for a while; can you feel it? Look at the news and what is happening globally now with the protest(s) on Wall Street. It seems apparent that the American public is growing increasingly aware of something that our politicians and big business are blind to. I saw it in our numbers last Christmas. From what I could tell, everyone that purchased from the Appleton Basket Company last year had been to our site at least once before. Why is this remarkable? Because the American consumer is once again beginning to care (and care deeply) about how to spend the money they earn.

We have always tried to create good products that will be useful and bring a smile to the gift receivers face. We try to be as "green" or "sustainable" as we can (and that's not easy in our business). We believe in "paying it forward" by taking a small portion of each gift basket sale and donating to worthy charitable organizations here at home and even abroad in some cases. We value deeply the people we buy goods from as much as the people we sell to. In short, we know there are those of you out there that care (as we do) and we try like heck to "walk the talk" because "we" are "you" and we know it.

There's some new things we'd like to share with you. First, we decided to rework our Family Game Night Gift Basket. When the weather outside makes us stay inside, there's no better way to have family fun than with games. We decided to change the contents of our Family Game Night Gift Basket and include two classic board games; Monopoly and Scrabble. We also include two card games: Uno and Sorry Revenge, a deck of regular playing cards and some healthy snack mixes. You can  see the new Family Game Night Gift Basket here.

In thinking about the above Gift Basket, we realized we were excluding families with younger kids so (you guessed it) we created a Family Game Night-Young Kids Edition. We replaced the board games with Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land, two classic board games for kids just learning how to play board games. We also included both an I Spy and an Old Maid Card Game as well as the two healthy snack mixes. You can see the new Family Game Night-Younger Kids Edition here.

But wait, there's more! We have good friends that are NASCAR fans and they've been after us to create a "car" gift basket. So, we've also added to our collection of Kids Gift Baskets, the Hot Wheels Kids Gift Basket. Five Hot Wheels cars, a pack of track, two monster trucks, a Hot Wheels Customizable Puzzle and two healthy snacks; Vah-room!