4. early christmas crazy.

When we last visited Burgh Baby, she was leading an effort that eventually raised $5,300 for the March of Dimes in the name of a little girl named Maddie. I commented then that we should all be thankful that she chooses to use her powers for good.

(Actually, that’s not quite the last time we visited Burgh Baby. I am happy to report that my really hawt second basechick didn’t hit me in the head with a softball even once this season. But that’s a whole different subject.)

I’m generally reticent to pay any attention to Christmas-related stuff until after Thanksgiving, but BB has another venture going, one that is cool enough that I think I can set aside my self-imposed holiday schedule. A couple weeks ago, BB found herself as a finalist in a mommy blogging contest sponsored by The Bump, a pregnancy and parenting website run by the same folks who bring you The Knot, a wedding-planning site that I spent entirely too much time on about a decade ago. BB announced that if she won, she would use her $1,000 prize to start her own version of Christmas Crazy — she’d buy toys for needy kids and donate them to Toys for Tots and to the Hope Center, a domestic violence shelter serving Allegheny and Westmoreland counties.

Except that there were shenanigans involved in the voting — meaning automated voting scripts took over the polling, rolling up impossible totals on the first day the polls were open. When she noticed that her site was one of those “benefiting” from the bot-voting, BB took herself out of the contest — which the Bumpers eventually took down and then resurrected, presumably with more safeguards in place.

But — egged on by her readers and friends, BB says she’s going to raise that $1,000 anyway. And that’s where we come in. She’s trying to get the money in her hands by $1,000, so the toys can be ready to go once the Christmas season gets underway (presumably after Thanksgiving, right, BB?). You can donate by going to the PayPal site she has set up, or you can buy an ad on her site. (A hint about that ad — BB gets many, many, many, many, many more page views than most of us mortals, so I’d have to think a $50 display ad would likely be worth your while.)

As I’ve said before — resistance is futile. When BB gets an idea in her head, she follows through. So make it easy on yourself, on her and — of course — on the families that will benefit from BB’s efforts: Hit up her PayPal account or buy an ad on her site. This kind of Christmas Crazy is worth spreading, even if it’s just a few days after Halloween.