To add some fun into our Home for the Holidays week, we thought we’d ask YOU to share your favorite things about the holidays! On each site, we’ve got a question we’d like you to answer. Share your thoughts here in the comments, and then hop to the other sites to find out what we’d like to know!

Movies are one of my absolute favorite things about the holidays. Cornball or prolific, there aren’t many Christmas flicks I won’t watch.

My favorite? It’s a toss-up. I do love me some Elf, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, and A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version is my fave). But if I could only watch one movie this Christmas, it’d have to be It’s a Wonderful Life. Both funny and profound, you can’t help but watch Jimmy Stewart and reflect on the value of your own life. It’s wonderful, indeed.
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We could do a daily run of giveaways during Home for the Holidays, but instead we wanted to pepper our week by telling you about some organizations doing remarkable things.

I met Maann on another hot, sweaty day near the equator in the Philippines (her house is shown above). Our group of bloggers had been visiting families and communities impacted by Compassion all week, and the stories were, as you might imagine, heart-poundingly emotional.

Here’s how we’d spend our days: We’d leave the hotel soon after breakfast, and ride on bumpy roads via a chandelier bedecked bus, sometimes for an hour or two. Our mornings were spent at one of many development centers, where Compassion was working in a community. We’d have lunch with those volunteers, spend the afternoons visiting families with sponsored children, return to the hotel for a shower and dinner, and get to clacking on our keyboards long into the night. Rinse and repeat.

We were exhausted.

So by day four, we met Maann and some of her friends, and for me, that’s when it all turned around for me in the Philippines.
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