`Tis the season … and we at SNEWS® and GearTrends® hope you and yours have a great Christmas and a safe and festive New Year. (And if you already celebrated Hanukkah, we hope it was merry and bright.)

We will be taking off from Dec. 23 and will return Jan. 2. So don’t you be looking for an emailed SNEWS® News Digest until after the New Year. We will be spending time with family, neighbors and friends, getting outside to play, and generally enjoying a healthy and fit holiday – and we hope you will be too!

Not to say that if some great big ol’ news story breaks, we won’t cover it. We most certainly will. But our next SNEWS® News Digest for both outdoor and fitness will go out the evening of Jan. 2. And we already have some great reads up our sleeves.

For those of you who want to keep chatting with industry friends to keep busy, head to the SNEWS® Chat room, lots of discussion going on there. To go directly to the list of the most recent posts, click on www.snewsnet.com/forums.

We also recommend you activate your SNEWS® RSS feed. Thousands have already and they are finding it purely delightful to see a story pop-up for reading consideration within minutes of it appearing on the SNEWS® headline pages. Nothing could be simpler and there is no better way to put you in the driver's seat for receiving news as it happens. For busy subscribers, RSS means no more missing key news headlines because you missed a Digest or two. The headlines pop up in a small window when they are posted, and you decide whether you want to read them or not. Setting up RSS on your computer only takes a few minutes. Click here to get started. http://www.snewsnet.com/cgi-bin/snews/05753.html

Well, those are enough gifts to keep you busy til we're back! Happy Holidays to all, and see you in 2007!