How about greeting your guests and family as they come through your front door or walk up your front steps? Using tomato cages for body frames, cover with strong white cloth that will withstand blowing winds, and beautiful snowflakes that fall, and attach earmuffs, vests, and they can even hold an old sled or set of skis for that quick-decision trip through woods.

You can even decorate hot chocolate with whipped topping snowpeople, trace on cookies with icing and snowpeople pancakes are a hit for week-end brunch. The possibilities are endless and are only reigned in by your time and willingness to spend a few minutes in land of Frosty and friends. So gather up grandma and grandpa, aunts, uncles, children, cousins, and whoever else is within reach and start creating a whole family of snow friends to share your wintry days, even though it might be sunshiny bright with nary a cloud in sky, but fun will just "melt" away after holiday days. ENJOY! ©Arleen M. Kaptur 2005 January Arleen's site: http://www.arleenssite.com

Surprisingly, considering a whole new market has been opened up for their movies and a demand has been shown, Hollywood is not too happy about such services and rather than jumping on bandwagon, has actually voiced opposition to perceived dismemberment of their 'art'. However, under copyright laws, so long as editing company holds a copy of original, unedited movie in their offices for each one they sell, or customer owns a copy, then editing process is both legal and irreproachable. Score one for good guys!

Unfortunately, this kind of messing around does mean that family edited movies do cost more than their unedited counterparts . As edited DVDs can not be sold as edited DVDs, you basically pay for original DVD movie plus cost of editing it. Effectively this amounts to a few dollars more on top of normal retail price of a movie. However, for those who do not wish to pay more, there are a number of family safe DVD rental services around which are just like say, Netflix, but offering nothing but movies with edited content for rental.

Despite inflated prices of family edited movies, these kinds of services are invaluable for anyone who yearns for golden age of movies, is tired of having their entertainment spoiled by questionable scenes, or for parents who seek to protect their children from Hollywood's often dubious standards of morality. If that's not worth paying out an extra dollar or two, I don't know what is!

Useful Links:

Cleanfilms.comM - Edited movie retail and rental. - Independent review of cleanfilms.com and past/present customer comments. DVD Rental Services - Online movie rental services compared and contrasted.