Looking to driftaway from the city and explore the country to bring in the New Year?

Christmas and the summer holidays are right around the corner, meaning lots of Kiwi families will be opting for an adventurous camping NZ holiday.

Getting out and seeing New Zealand’s great outdoors doesn’t have to mean roughing it though. If you’d like to experience New Zealand your way, why not opt for a campervan rental, so you can take care of your travel and accommodation in one easy hit.

A campervan NZ road trip is one of the best ways to see the countryside, while also being able to take the comforts of home with you while you travel. Whether you’re exploring the north or the south during your camping NZ summer holiday, getting behind the wheel of a campervan or motorhome will offer you the best of both vacation worlds.

Christmas is almost here! With just five full days left the silly season has officially begun. Office parties, late night Christmas shopping, out-of-town family starting to arrive.

Once you’ve got your Christmas day menu sorted for next Thursday, have you thought about how you’re going to celebrate the day? Christmas traditions in New Zealand are normally pretty low-key for most Kiwi families – presents in the morning, then food, sun, food, and more sun.

If you’d like to celebrate the holiday with a traditional Christian Christmas in mind, find a church service to ring in the celebratory day, and reacquaint yourself with many of your favourite Christmas carols from your childhood.

Image from Flickr.

December’s rolled in, meaning you’ve got the go ahead to spruce up your home and workplace with Christmas decorations! No judgment, of course, for those who put theirs up earlier (mine went up two weeks ago) – but now the festive season can really begin! Find the perfect Christmas trees and decorations and get in the merry spirit this year.

If you’ve got kids around why not teach them some popular Christmas carols to entertain the family with throughout the month? There’s nothing cuter than wee tykes trying their hardest to belt out a Mariah Carey Christmas cover!

With the big day just three weeks away, it’s time to start planning your Christmas recipes. Croissants for breakfast, ham and cake for lunch, leftovers for dinner? Get the lowdown on planning for a great Kiwi Christmas and get your recipes sorted early.

If you’re sending out e-cards, newsletters or any other communication to the outside world this month, you’ll need to add in the perfect Christmas pictures. Use our guide to finding online images to suit all of your visual Christmas needs.

Image from Flickr.

With Christmas Day just four weeks away now, you’ve probably got your vacation destination in place and are counting down the days. Whether it be your new beach house in the Cormandel, your uncle’s fishing hut in Kaikoura or a rented holiday home in Invercargill, baches are quintessential to the Kiwi Christmas.

There’ll be one slight setback for the holidays – an unlikely chance of internet access! For those who don’t have mobile internet solutions, you’re probably pretty unlikely to encounter a broadband connection at your bach. Sure, the holidays are a time to relax and get away from the stresses of work and daily life – but more than a day without going online may be quite hard for the many of us who rely on the internet for personal e-mailing, banking, weather, maps, and entertainment guides.

Fear not, because you do have a low-cost solution, you can connect to dial up! Dial up internet access can be the perfect solution for those on holiday or in a temporary location. There aren’t any fussy routers or setup involved, all you need is a dial up account (which you can prepay by month), and a house with a connected phone line. Dial up may not be of the lightening speed that you’re used to, but it’s a great way to get online with no set up costs or contracts, and it certainly gets the jobs done that you need. Thinking about how you’re going to stay online this Christmas? For a cheap internet provider, dial up is the easiest and most convenient holiday internet solution.

Constant reminders of the current world economic state may be hard to dodge in our media-filled lives, but that doesn’t mean scrimping on luxuries – just a change in the kind of luxuries we consume.

The entertainment industry believes that sectors like video games and DVDs will be buffered from the effects of the financial crisis that are hitting many other industries. When the film Iron Man hit DVD stores on September 30 in the US, the same week that the $700 million bailout bill was in proposition, the movie sold a record 500,000 copies on Blu-Ray for the first week. Similarly, the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace, which opens in New Zealand today, pulled in nearly US$30 million more on its opening weekend in the US in mid-November than its predecessor, Casino Royale.

While there is no question many are tightening their belts on luxuries, it seems lower-priced entertainment is taking a bit shift to replace the luxuries of the past. While parents may have taken their children on a waterskiing holiday over Christmas in previous years, the trend this year may be buying a gift in the form of a Nintendo Wii console and a few supplementing Wii Fit games to virtually ride the waters.

With options for NZ shopping online just a click away, consumers are expected to buy up larger this year on in-home entertainment. Instead of buying a new car or taking a trip, consumers are moving to a more cost-conscious way of enjoying their disposable incomes, so don’t be surprised when you find yourself with more video games and high-def entertainment than you can shake a stick at this Christmas!

Image from Flickr.

The festive calendar really ticked over yesterday: just five weeks until Christmas. While shopping malls have had decorations up and yuletide tunes playing since the start of November, consumers throughout New Zealand can really now starting thinking about managing their Christmas this year.

Planning your Christmas needs to start early, so it’s a good idea to start a list now. Cook a Christmas meal, or order everything from the deli the day before? Decorate the Christmas tree with last year’s ornaments, or take advantage of the many stores already offering discounted Christmas products? Buy New Zealand made products, or imported gifts? Decisions, decisions! NZS.com is here to help you out with many of your common Christmas queries, and we’ll be regularly featuring tips and articles on the blog in the lead up to Santa’s visit.

While we’re five weeks out, you should get onto planning your Christmas party and start putting together your Christmas cards list. More tips to come next week!

Image from Flickr.

Are you set with your holiday season travel plans yet? For most of us, the answer to that question is still no, even though we’re only 6 weeks out from the festive break. The reason? Searching for the best travel deals can be such a tasking experience it’s enough to make you want to stay home!

Trying to find the cheapest flights and best accommodation for you and your family isn’t always easy, especially when you don’t know where to start. Scour the daily paper every morning looking for flight sales? Open five windows or tabs at once and compare site after site (and trying to remember which prices included taxes and other costs and which didn’t)? It’s all a bit much, especially at this time of year.

Luckily, NZS.com has just launched a brand new travel deals section – and we’re about to make planning your holiday a whole lot easier for you. Our new travel page is powered by Wego, and searches over 100 different travel websites, including online travel agencies like Zuji, consolidators like Orbitz, airline websites, and hotel websites. This means we can find you the best deals available online, even sale fares and limited promotional deals from budget airlines like Pacific Blue and Jetstar.

It’s fast, it’s easy, and you can customise just about every variable – from flight times to price range – so make sure you plan your travel this Christmas via NZS.com’s New Zealand travel deals section.

According to a recent US study, consumers now prefer online bargain shopping to in-store shopping for holiday gifts. It seems busy malls and shopping centres aren’t the primary place for Christmas presents anymore for anyone who normally purchases anything online at least four times a year.

The reasons for finding bargains online are mainly attributed to the potential savings in time, which 88% of respondents designated as their key reason for shopping on the net. Locating hard to find products, avoiding mall crowds and greater selection were also deciding factors in shopping online instead of in physical stores.

E-tailing Group, the body who conducted the survey, stated that value spending is definitely the mantra this year as multitasking shoppers keep tabs on the web to get the best deals:

“Holiday gift buying is particularly impacted by this propensity for shopping smart as consumers preview online to get the most for their money.”

In New Zealand, things are set to follow the trend with online department stores offering bigger and better ranges of branded products as heavily discounted prices. When safe shopping online is so fast and easy, why wouldn’t you want to avoid the shopping centres this holiday season?

Image from Flickr.

The newspapers have already started advertising restaurants with Christmas function availabilities – which means the festival season is about to kick off! Yes, it’s still eleven weeks away, but we’re all so busy these days it’s really only eleven weeks away!

Christmas functions are always the first to get organised, and then comes the stressful part: Christmas Shopping. So many gifts to buy, so few ideas. Have you starting thinking about how you’re going to tackle your shopping this year?

Christmas sales online are now more popular than ever, you can find the best discounted brands at amazing prices on the NZ web, even when the malls and shopping centres won’t budge on their RRPs.

Christmas shopping for kids is made super-easy online, check out our ideas for the best toys for Christmas 2008, to take all of the guessing out of your little ones’ present buying this year. Make sure you buy brands online to save on time, money, and the most important thing: your sanity!

Midwinter Christmas celebrations aren’t typically all the rage these days – the concept of it is, I admit, a little silly. Still, today is the 25^th day of the sixth month of the year, meaning half a year since the last yuletide holiday celebration, and half a year until the next.

I never really though of midwinter Christmas being a uniquely New Zealand or Australian celebration (if you can call it a celebration), but after giving the concept a little thought it seems appropriately so. We are brought up on the notion that Christmas is a wintery, magical time filled with warm egg nog and snow sledding – when in fact a Kiwi Christmas is more commonly set amongst a BBQ and sweltering 30 degree heat.

So in the depths of the Kiwi winter, when the temperatures are in the single digits and in many parts of the country you are surrounded by actual snow, why not have a little fun and let your childhood fantasies of a white Christmas become a reality? Several websites have also suggested that a midwinter Christmas down under is a way for Northern Hemisphere immigrants to rejoice their most celebrated day amongst home comforts, which also seems quite appropriate. Either way, it’s a good excuse for a hearty home cooked meal with friends or family.

The yams are in season, and there’s never a bad time to roast a ham – so have a little fun and get yourself out of the winter blues and into the Christmas spirit for the rest of the week!

Image from Flickr.