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Letter to the editor

It's time to turn back the hands of time

By Times Staff, Wires
Published November 3, 2007

Tell us how you shop at Ikea

Ikea, the chic-and-cheap furniture and housewares store that has attracted an almost cultlike following, opens Nov. 14 in Orlando. What lengths have you gone to to shop at Ikea up till now? Road trips to Atlanta? A stop at the store outside Toronto while vacationing in Canada? What tips do you Ikea veterans have for the rest of us? Tell us how you shop the store, the must-haves, the insider secrets. E-mail your advice to stark@sptimes.com (put Ikea in the subject line).

Prepare for holiday entertaining early

Here's a tip from designer Mary Emmerling, writing in Country Home magazine: As soon as November rolls around, she gets out all the china, crystal, linens and silver she expects to use for holiday entertaining and cleans, presses and polishes them. Then she's ready for the season. No last-minute panic as the guests ring the doorbell. This is also a good time to take a quick inventory of candles, cocktail napkins, coasters, anything else you may need to buy or remember where you packed them away.

Tell retailers to hold the catalogs

Your mailbox is probably groaning under the weight of all those holiday gift catalogs. (Retailers send out 19-billion annually, which is a lot of trees.) If you'd like the retailers to cease and desist, visit www.catalogchoice.org. This Web site was developed by three nonprofit environmental groups: the National Wildlife Federal, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ecology Center. They relay requests to retailers to remove names from mailing lists. Retailers are glad to clean their lists; why spend money sending a catalog to someone who doesn't want it? The service is free. Sign on, designate the catalogs you no longer wish to receive, and you'll be deleted.

[Last modified November 1, 2007, 16:51:56]