Holiday Traditions | Personalized Children's Books | I See Me | Maia Haag | MomCave LIVE

Jen talks holiday traditions (some touching, some funny) with Maia Hagg, children's book author and founder of I See Me Personalized Children's Books.  What are YOUR holiday traditions?

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Jen of MomCaveTV:  

Welcome to Momcave LIVE, where we may have lost our minds, but we haven’t lost our sense of humor. I’ve certainly lost my mind. I’m Jen. I’m happy to be here doing live, which we haven’t done in a while. And we have a special guest today, which is, tada. They’re going to show her in 3..2..1.. Maia Haag. From “I See Me!” books. Maia is here, because she is going to talk with us about holiday traditions. So first of all, Maia is the co-founder of “I See Me!” books, which are personalized books. They’re awesome. We’ve had a few in our family. And they have a new one coming out for Christmas that we’ll talk about. Maia, I assume you’re a mom. Yes?

Maia: I’m a mom of three. Yeah.

Jen: I knew there were yes, multiple children.

Maia: Mom three times over. 

Jen: So do you have any, like, what’s your biggest holiday tradition that you do in your family?

Family Holiday Tradition: Santa always drops a Present on our roof by mistake

Maia: We have two big ones. I would say one is Santa always drops a present on our roof, by mistake, with his sleigh and so every Christmas morning the kids run out. And my husband uses a rake and there’s snow on the roof because we live in Minnesota. We have to find the present on the roof and rake it down. And it always bounces off the driveway, so it can’t be anything too electronic, and it’s soggy because it’s been sitting in the snow.

Jen: It’s something that can’t really get wet, right?....

Read the rest of the episode transcript at our blog: www.momcavetv.com/holiday-traditions

Transcript

0:00

- Could be it. Hi, Facebook. We're just setting up to go live. We're gonna talk about holiday traditions. We're gonna give away a copy of an awesome book. And I'm just making sure that we have our guests live on all the places. So I'm gonna try one more time over here on Instagram and see if I can find you. I See Me!-- Books.- It's like Instagram doesn't like me. It's not showing up. Hmm. Hi, people of Instagram. Instagram's giving me trouble. Let's try one thing, Maia, before we officially go live, since I can't get it to work on Instagram. Can you go on Instagram and go to MomCaveTV and watch the Live? And when I see your name pop up, I'll invite you. Technology. And if that doesn't work, we'll just get started.- Okay. We are gonna talk about funny Christmas traditions, touching Christmas traditions. We wanna hear about all of your Christmas traditions, and we're going to be giving away a free personalized book to start your own Christmas tradition.- I'm following you.- Okay.- Jennifer Weedon Palazzo.- Oh, no. MomCaveTV.- MomCaveTV, yes. Following you.- Hmm. Okay. Final time I'm gonna try to add her, and if it doesn't work, well, that's life. Okay. I See Me!. So strange. Okay, Instagram, we're gonna abandon you for now and come back later. (laughs) All right.(Maia chuckles) Let's get official about this. Hi, everybody on Facebook. We want you to talk with us today, comment. You will have a chance to win a personalized book. And this is all about us getting a chance to sort of hang out a little bit before we go full steam into that holiday season. So let me be all official and first play our intro.(phone ringing)(child hollering)(dog barking)- Honey, hurry.(child whining)(door latches)(gentle music)- Where am I? Do, do, do. Welcome to MomCave LIVE, where we may have lost our minds, but we haven't lost our senses of humor. I've certainly lost my mind. I'm Jen. I'm happy to be here doing LIVE, which we haven't done in a while. And we have a special guest today, which is, ta-da, they're gonna show her in 3, 2, 1. Maia Haag from I See Me! Books. Hi, Maia.- Hi, Jen.- Thanks for joining me and putting up with all of my technical issues.(Maia chuckles)(Jen laughs) It's never easy.- Right.- Maia is here because she is going to talk with us about holiday traditions, and she's gonna give away something really cool to one of you who comments and talks with us. So first of all, Maia is the co-founder of I See Me! Books, which are personalized books. They're awesome. We've had a few in our family. And they have a new one coming out for Christmas that we'll talk about. Maia, I assume you're a mom, yes?- I'm a mom of three, yes.- I knew there were multiple children involved. Mom three times over.- Yes.- So do you have any, like, what's your biggest holiday tradition that you do as your family?- Ooh, we have two big ones, I would say. One is Santa always drops a present on our roof by mistake with his sleigh.(Jen laughs) And so every Christmas morning the kids run out, and my husband uses a rake, and there's snow on the roof'cause we live in Minnesota.- Aw.- And we have to find the present on the roof and rake it down, and it always bounces off the driveway, so it can't be anything too electronic.- No.- Sometimes it's soggy'cause it's been sitting in the snow.- Right, it can't be something that can't really get wet in case, right?- Right. So that's one of our traditions. And the other one that we've had for literally, I have pictures going back to when our kids were toddlers, is we read "The Night Before Christmas" as a family each night, each Christmas Eve. And so I'm the photographer. My husband sits there with the kids around him, and there's usually a dog in the scene. We have two cats. They're jumping all around. And he reads "The Night Before Christmas" to the three of them, and I take pictures.- That's lovely.- Yes.- Hi. Mikaela's watching. And she said, "That is such a creative tradition." I'm assuming she's talking about the roof one.(Maia laughs) Amazing. Yeah. So do you have a collection of these pictures year by year like where you can look at them all next to each other?- You know, I recently went in and pulled all the ones from all the different years, and it's really fun watching it. And what's actually quite entertaining is the pictures look idyllic of, you know, it's a snapshot in time when everyone's smiling and looking in the book. But usually what's going on is the brother's like bothering the sister or, you know, there's always the memories that are not exactly always captured in the picture.- Yeah.- It's really fun seeing it over all the years.- You know the behind the scenes.- Yes.- Mikaela, let us know what's one of your Christmas traditions? So I like the roof thing. I like that's creative. How do you get on the roof?- It's just thrown up there the night before, and then literally we just have a long, long rake that we use to pull it down. And so that's the tradition. And there's also one more, Santa generally is pretty messy when he comes down the chimney, and so there's always a little bit of ash that's come out from the edge of the fireplace, and there's always a silver button. Every year he loses a silver button from his red jacket. And so the kids have these collections of red silver bell buttons that he's lost.- That's so sweet. Yeah. I like making the evidence. That's a fun thing for me. And even though both of my children don't really truly believe in Santa anymore, I will continue to make the evidence.- Yes, yes, exactly. For sure. Now it's the tradition of it all.- Right, it's fun. It's fun for mom, so we do it. So everybody watching, if you wanna comment and tell us about your holiday traditions, we're gonna give away a copy of this book, and I'm gonna show you right now, ta-da. So this is one of your latest things you have this season at I See Me!, and can you tell us a little bit about this book?- Yes. Okay. So this is "The Haag Family Night Before Christmas." And so we make it with your family's name in it. So as I mentioned, my family's been reading the traditional, non-personalized version of this for a lot of years, and then we thought, well, let's make it personalized for your family. And so now it's even more special. So in the book, you have your last name here. You select the skin tone of Santa that you want, light, medium, or dark. And then in this story, all throughout the story, you have the family's last name and all the names of the family members.- Oh.- Here, the last name is on the fireplace. And the kids are in bed dreaming about Christmas, and it has all the names of the family members. And so as you go through the story, there are different places. For example, the names of the family members are on the tags on the-- Oh my goodness.- On the gifts that are... Here we are. The tags that are on the gifts that Santa is bringing. So it's just really fun'cause the kids hear the names all throughout the book and it keeps them really engaged and it brings down the number of times that the brother's bothering the sister.(Jen laughing)- Right, anything to keep the kids from fighting.(Maia laughs)- Right, 'cause they're engaged now'cause they're hearing their name throughout the book.- That's so neat. Anytime my kids have had a personalized book, they're just so surprised. They're like, "How did my name get in here? How did they know?" So that's a really cute thing.- Yes.- Cool. We're gonna give one of those away to somebody watching. So comment and tell us about your holiday traditions. And if you just wanna go ahead and buy one, I put the link in the comments. And we have a code. It's MOMCAVE20. You'll get 20% off. I love it. I had an idea about one of your traditions. The buttons, the silver buttons.- Mm-hmm.- When your kids are all grown and they go off to have homes of their own, they could take the collection of buttons and, like, you could string them together and it can be a Christmas tree ornament or something.- Oh, that's a great idea. That's a fantastic idea.- I'm all about making ornaments.- And or use them for their own Santa who keeps losing it and their-- Right, 'cause there's only so many buttons.- Right.- I'm sure. Jessica commented,"A tradition I have with my kids is we put candy canes on the tree to show that Santa has been there."- Oh, that's neat. I love that.- Good. And then do you guys eat the candy canes? That's a question. And how many candy canes a day are the children allowed to have? My kids are always wondering about that. So I stopped putting anything edible on our tree because it was disappearing.- Mm. Mm-hmm- It was totally disappearing. That was not good. So let's see. One of the traditions that we have is, this is a touching one, I guess, is my grandmother was, like, obsessed with Christmas, and she would do like the ugly Christmas sweater yet she didn't think it was ugly. She had Christmas everything, right? So she even had this pair of shoes that were her Christmas shoes. When she passed away, we found the Christmas shoes, of course, and no one knew what to do with these shoes. Nobody had the heart to throw them away. So my aunt or my cousin had this idea that the Christmas shoes each year would go live with a different family and we would put them under the tree.- Oh.- And so it would be like she was with us.- Oh, neat.- So, you know, it's a big family. I think here I have a picture. These are the Christmas shoes, and we put them, you know, under the tree, and then that family takes a picture, and we have a little album that all the pictures are in.- Neat.- Then they go to another family.- Oh, that's very neat. That's very cool.- It makes me cry a little. My son was very confused the first year that we had the shoes. I think he was like three, and he was like,"They're not new shoes. They're obviously used."(Maia laughs)"Why are you putting smelly shoes under the tree?" you know.- Oh, that's neat. I really like that. I really like that. We do have one other tradition. If there's a bigger present for the year, we always do a treasure hunt for it in the house to make it bigger. And what's fun is that our kids have now taken on this tradition, and so they do treasure hunts for gifts that they're giving to each other or to us. It can be a little gift, but they make it fun with the treasure hunt. So Christmas for us goes on forever because, you know, we've got these various treasure hunts that are built in throughout the gift, you know, during the gift opening process.- Oh, that's great. Yeah. I like it when you get to the age where, like, they're not waking up at 5:00 AM.- Right. Oh, for sure.(Jen laughs)- 'Cause then you're up, you haven't had your coffee yet. It's like, "And go!"- Yes, exactly.- You have all the stuff. Cool. Jessica says that of course they eat all of the candy canes in one day.(Maia laughs) Well, if you're gonna do it, go big. Okay, you guys. Share some more of your holiday traditions with us. Let's see. So I think there should be some sort of holiday tradition where on Christmas Eve when the parents are like preparing everything, it always ends up, right, that there's one thing that has to be put together, and you think it's not gonna be tough, but it's totally frustrating. And then you're really tired and we get grumpy. I feel like there has to be a tradition, like, to make that part fun. So like, I don't know, a certain, a Christmas cocktail or something.- Spiked eggnog.- Yeah. (chuckles)- That could be good.- Just something to help you to put together the thing and not get everyone stirred-- No, I know. Inevitably. Even now that our kids are a little older, we're never as well organized as we think we're gonna be.- I know, I know. We all try. Mikaela says, "We buy a new snow globe every year." Her grandmother started it. That's sweet.- Neat. Love that.- Yeah, and do you display them all year or they only come out at Christmas? That's a question. Let us know. Maia, do you do a lot of Christmas decorating at your house?- I would say we're a medium level when it comes to that.- Medium level, yeah.- I mean, my husband goes pretty crazy with the lights outside. And then we have those decorations that we pull out year, after year, after year that are sort of the Christmas decorations that come out.- Right.- And I will sometimes add a couple things here and there. But we're not as, like, some families, really every room, and we're not like that.- Yeah.- A couple of rooms get some things.- Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I grew up in a family like that for many generations. Everyone else is like that. Hey, Jesse Cowell's giving us a shout out. But I'm too lazy to do that. So as I love Christmas, it's my favorite thing ever, and I love the decorations, but I found myself as I was starting to put them out thinking, "I'm gonna have to put this back, and, like, very soon."(both laughing)- That's exactly right.- "In a few weeks, I'm gonna have to do the opposite of this." And so I definitely pared down at that point and now I do have less. Okay, this is a very divisive answer. So, or a divisive question. So I want everyone to answer in the comments. But, Maia, tinsel or no tinsel?- We don't do tinsel 'cause we have pets. And we had a year many years ago where our cat had a car accident. She was fine in the end, but right before Christmas, and we were in the animal hospital and we saw a lot of dogs coming in with tinsel in their stomachs. And so we sort of learned that way that that can be a dangerous thing for pets.- It can. Yeah, Mikaela's saying, "No tinsel!" We used to have two cats. They've gone on to cat heaven. And we did have tinsel, and I don't wanna gross anyone out. The tinsel came out the other end of the cat, but didn't fully detach from the cat, and so it was running around with tinsel coming out of it.- Yeah.- And it was really gross.- Yeah. It can be really dangerous for their intestines. It can be, really. Yeah.- Yeah. That makes sense. And I'm personally, like, not fond of tinsel. It's a little, I don't know. Again, another thing I have to clean up, A. (laughs) But, B, my husband loves it. So we have tinsel because we've made that compromise in our marriage that he has to have the tinsel. Yeah. Okay, what about like, do you have any traditions around food?- We have a Christmas meal that we make that's the same Christmas meal every time.- Oh, what's your Christmas meal?- Prime rib and sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top that are so sweet that they're really good, and green beans, and popovers. So that's what we do every year for our Christmas meal together. And then, other than that, just sugar cookies that we make for Santa with some carrots on the plate, and that's probably about it. I do love it. I really love the way that some families make a lot of cookies and treats for friends and neighbors. I think that's such a great tradition.- Yes. We love receiving them, for sure. (laughs)- Yeah, and one day if I have a little more time, I could see myself doing that.- You could someday.- Right.- So, guys, comment and tell us what your holiday traditional meal is, and somebody is gonna get to win the personalized "Night Before Christmas" book from I See Me!, or you could just buy it and use our code for 20% off. But what's your meal? Let me know. We don't really have a traditional Christmas meal. It has to have beef. Like, my husband insists that he must have some sort of red meat.- Yes.- So.- My husband's from Iowa. It's the same thing. Yeah.- That definitely has to be involved. I grew up in Baltimore where everything's about seafood, and so I always wanted to, you know, have some sort of seafood involved. And I'm very excited because this year I'm hosting Christmas for the first time in a long time, and I'm having family and-- It's a little pressure.- It's a little pressure. It's gonna be okay. It's casual. Just like my whole life is.- Right.- We'll do our best, but I wanna make, I definitely, there's gonna be a lot of Old Bay seasoning and seafood involved.- Nice. I think that's great.- Yeah. Mikaela, up. It says, "We always have lasagna." Lasagna is great.- Oh, that's a good one.- Yeah. The Italian Christmas dinner can be, like, massive. I will never live up to that. My husband is Italian, or Italian American, and so he grew up with, like, they do like courses and courses. There's like a fish course, a pasta course.- There's-- Oh, wow.- There's many courses, and there's a lot of pasta involved, and I could never live up to that. So I'm not even gonna try, I'm gonna stick with my seafood and my beef. Yeah.- I do think that the traditions that we were talking about earlier are really, really important almost no matter what they are because it just brings the family together to have these traditions.- Right.- And they bring it, they carry it forward with their kids. It makes Christmas really special. You don't wanna give up on the believing Santa thing because all the traditions are built around it, and so you just kind keep going.- You keep doing it.- Yeah.- And like your family with reading the story.- Yes.- We read "The Night Before Christmas" leading up to Christmas, you know, several times every year, too. And I think one of the most precious things to me is, like, you start out reading it to your kids because they can't read, and then as they learn to read, like, they start reading it or they read it to each other.- Yes.- How sweet.- I love that. Yeah. Maybe this year we'll have one of our kids read it instead of Allan, actually. I like that. Usually, when we read it the night before Christmas, we also let them each open one small gift, and so it's part of it also.- Nice, nice. Okay. Now does anybody have a Christmas tradition to tell us about that is like completely ridiculous or that is not a traditional thing? If you do, comment. We would love to hear it. I don't think I have anything that's too ridiculous. I mean, smelly old shoes under the tree is a little weird.- That's a good one.(both laughing)- I don't know if it's totally ridiculous. When I was a kid, my mom would do this thing where, you know, we had the little nativity set, and they were like this little ceramic nativity, and the baby Jesus wouldn't be there until Christmas or Christmas Eve or something.- I like that.- Like she wouldn't put the little baby Jesus out. Like they were waiting for the little baby Jesus.- That makes sense.- Right. But the funny part is then she started one year saying, like, Christmas Eve we would sing "Happy Birthday."- Ah.- To little baby Jesus.- Okay, makes sense.- It makes sense, but it's weird. And I don't know that anyone else in the world ever does that, but my mom was like that. She's very funny, and she decided that that was part of our tradition, so.- That's great.- Institute it that way. What other kinds of books do you have for sale over at I See Me!?- We have a lot of different books. They're all personalized, and they include your child's name and sometimes other information that's in the story. And we weave the child's name not only into the story but through the illustrations. And so on the children's end of things, I'll share one book called"Goodnight Little Me," or "Goodnight Little," in this case,"Bearett" is the child's name.- Oh, wow.- And this people give a lot as a new baby gift for a child who's just been born. This was illustrated by Mary GrandPre, who illustrated "Harry Potter." So a really phenomenal illustrator. And the child's name is actually in the illustrations as you can see here. Oh, my goodness. That's so special. So it's really a beautifully written sort of lyrical story. There's the child's name again and the illustrations. So, I See Me!, we don't just put the name into the story. We truly make the book for the child. And here you can see the mice bringing the letters on the flags, and depending on the number of letters in the child's name, the number of mice change on the page.(Jen laughs)- Yeah, wow.- So that's "Good Night Little Me" that is really popular as a new baby gift. And then we have books that are personalized for kids that have, you can upload the photo of the child's face and the child becomes the astronaut or the fireman. So that's really fun. We have books that have your child as the avatar where you're selecting the skin tone and hair color. At I See Me!, it's really important to us that we allow each child to be represented in the story to look like them. And so whether it's through a photo representation or the avatar that looks like them, it really helps kids engage in the story when they can see themselves in the story. And then in addition to all of our books that are for kids that go all the way from baby gifts up to about age eight is our age range, we also have books now that involve your dog. And so I wrote a book a couple years ago called "If My Dog Could Talk." And in this story, you select your breed. We have a lot of different dog breeds on our site, and you select the color of your breed. So if it's a poodle, this will look like a poodle on the front, for example. And then in the story it has all the family member names, and it's written from the perspective of the dog talking about what it's like to be a member of the family. And so it's all written from your dog and it's a pretty entertaining story that the kids get a kick out of. So that's "If My Dog Could Talk." And then this season we just introduced a book called "How My Dog Saved Christmas" that is really, really fun. And and you can have one or two dogs in it and the dogs are naughty and causing problems at Christmas, but then at the end of the story, they save the day, or either one or two dogs depending on whether you have one or two in your family. They save the day and save Christmas. And so it's really fun because these books engage children to want to read. They see their names in it. And we get lots of stories about kids bringing our personalized books to kindergarten for their favorite, you know how you're supposed to bring your favorite book and read it to the story, read it to the class. Our kids wanna read the books over and over again'cause they have their names in them.- That's so great. I'm all about anything that, first of all, is special and something that they'll remember forever, but also anything that gets kids reading.- Yes.- You know, 'cause we're competing all the time with the screens now, so like.- I know. Yes, exactly.- Yeah.- Exactly. Jen, did you read to your kids when they were little?- Yes, and I have to admit though, I have two kids. The first kid I was great about it and read every night before bed. The second kid, I feel like she's a little bit getting the short end of the stick because now life is so busy that many nights it's like, "Oh, shoot. It's bedtime. Let's go to bed." (laughs)- No, I know. And I have been guilty as a parent. Have you ever done it where if there's too much text on the page, you read half of the text and then you turn the page and they're like, "No, no, no, no." (laughs)- Right.- "You missed some sentences." And then you go back and you have to read it. You know, or if it's a really long book, you might skip a page.- You're like, "I can't read the whole thing tonight. Nope."- Right, right. That doesn't work. Our kids always caught me with that.- Your books are a good length, so luckily they're not too long to be a bedtime book.- Exactly. And they're written in rhyme for the most part also, which makes it fun and lyrical, especially for young kids to hear that.- Yeah, and it helps with reading. To learn to read things in rhyme actually helps them develop their reading skills.- That's exactly right.- So yeah, everybody watching, after this is over, we're gonna pick a comment and somebody's gonna win a copy of the personalized "Night Before Christmas" book, but you can also grab your own right at ISeeMe.com and use our code MOMCAVE20 for 20% off. It makes a really special gift.- Yes, a lot of times people give our, not only for new baby gifts as we've discussed, but at Christmas, sometimes grandparents will buy it for all the grandkids because it's a gift that you don't have to worry about worry that they already have. Our aunts will buy them for their nieces and nephews. And then a lot of times, a child will get one in the family and then the parents will end up getting one for the other kids because they wish that they had one. So it's a fun gift-giving product because it's really fun for the giver and then the child who receives it loves it and then it encourages reading, which is a really important part of why we do this.- Yeah, it's a great gift. So we have plenty of time to order this, and it gives you, you know, check that off your list, you guys. This is an easy gift to think of. So thank you so much for telling us all about it and being here. And we're gonna put this video up on all the places, and we're gonna pick somebody to give a free book to. And I just had a good time talking to you.- Thanks, Jen. I did too.- Thank you. Okay, well, have a great holiday season. I hope it's stress free and wonderful for you.- Likewise. And that you don't have to put something together

until 2: 27:10

00 AM the night before.- Right. And if you do, you have spiked eggnog.(Maia laughs) Okay, you guys. Thank you for watching.- Take care.- Bye-bye.