It is more blessed to give

Than to receive. Since it’s still the beginning of October, many of the local stores are almost bursting to the seams with Christmas decor and crafts. Yes, I do say Christmas.

The other night, I found a Living Social deal where you pay $35 and receive a credit for $100 to Picaboo, a photo website. I first encountered Picaboo through a post by Mrs. Turkey because she ordered one of their photo books as a guest book. Early on, I decided to make photo coffee table books for each of our parental sets as a full wedding gift.

I purchased the Living Social deal and headed to the website. Coincidentally, they were running a special on various products for Columbus Day weekend. Nothing more American than celebrating a federal holiday with discounts. After reading the fine print, I discovered that said discounts were only running through Sunday night, BUT through midnight Pacific time. Score one for living on the east coast.

I then dragged Mac into the fray but demanding that he help select photos (we decided to give the same book to each parental unit and included all the formal portrait shots of each family). We picked around 50 photos to fill the 20 page book listed in the special. Picaboo has a wonderful setting where they automatically format the book based off the photos. We opted for the Regency book in the wedding style (mostly black or white patterned pages). Our photos were uploaded relatively in order (first look, ceremony, portraits, reception), but we did have to reorder and rearrange a few photos.

One option that drew me to Picaboo was the option of lay-flat pages. The profile of the book with these pages allows for a single image to be evenly printed across the width of the book without creating the crack of doom (a new term, patent pending). These incur another cost per page, but we decided to make the whole book flat.

This From Mrs. Turkey’s Wbee page

Not this. www.picaboo.com

We sorted through the photos and wound up with 26 pages. This does add a cost on top of the flat cost of the book. The base cost for the Regency is $69.99, and each of our books was around $88.  At checkout, we discovered that we stayed awake for nothing because you can’t combine a Living Social deal with a coupon code. Bummer. This was around 12:30 am. We subtracted the $100 credit and added in shipping for a total of $96.83. This obviously wasn’t the cheapest option, but we liked the overall quality and layout of this book. We’ll give these to our parents over Christmas in addition to some various gifts we bought during our honeymoon.

What did y’all gift your parents? Did anyone else go the photo book route?