For the last day of the 12 Days of Holiday Giveaways, I wanted to close the “giveaway galore” with something that is lasting. Something that can give well beyond the holiday season. That helps you capture holiday memories and all the memories you’ll have in 2012.

The perfect answer was a year-long premium subscription to Smilebox.

Smilebox was founded in 2005 by a group of optimists with a lofty mission: joy is one of the world’s most important renewable resources, and they wanted to help people share it by connecting friends and family in sharing life’s special moments. They found a new and inspired way for us to share treasured photos and videos with family and friends. I have been using it off and on since that time, to find fun ways to share home memories with my father who has been in Afghanistan.

As Smilebox states on their website, “You need to stop reading and go make an awesome Smilebox for your favorite people in the world…Share the love and the smiles.” ….Whether down the street or across the world.

Everything from the ability to take a picture with your free Smilebox iPhone app and then add fun captions to ordinary pictures or, my favorite part – the ability to create online scrapbooks, slideshows and personalized e-cards set to music that you can store, email, post to your blog, post to Facebook or Twitter, print or save to a DVD, Smilebox is such fun.

It is all free, but if you want an ad-free experience, you can sign up for a $30 a year membership, which also gets you more features and designs. You can also add Smilebox to your tool bar (Mac or PC) making it easy at anytime to create a scrapbook, make a slideshow, or send an email card to the grandparents. There are tons of designs, themes, music and picture possibilities, and if you install Smilebox, it even recognizes when you upload new photos to your computer and asks if you want to make a Smilebox creation from the new pix.

Like I mentioned before, you can then share your creation directly from Smilebox: Email it, Burn it to DVD, Save it, Facebook it, or Tweet it. For bloggers, you can upload to WordPress or Blogger directly, which is an unique way to share a product review or blogging event.

Needless to say I am a HUGE fan. For example, in October, I used it to create a birthday party invitation to my son’s 2nd Birthday Party. I also sent a Smilebox Thank You e-card to everyone who attended and used pictures from the party to give it a personalized feel. I also used Smilebox in November. I picked a “Give Thanks” theme that we sent out the day before Thanksgiving. I said how thankful we were for our family; personalized family pictures played in a slideshow with music and the last picture was an ultrasound photograph, which we used to announce that we were expecting baby number two! This month, I send out a Holiday Card with lots of pictures. It saved us lots of money in postage and having to order paper cards, saved us time in addressing and mailing them, saved the environment since it was less paper and gave us the opportunity to use 10 pictures rather than just one!

Honestly, I could go on and on, but you really do need to stop reading. Go to Smilebox.com, download the software and get going. It is simple, fun and everyone will love it. But if you want a premium membership I’m giving one away. While the monetary value is not as large as some of the other 12 Days of Holiday Giveaways I had this year, it is by far the most valuable one in terms of memories and smiles.

Happy Holidays everyone! I look forward to sharing more Chronicles with you in 2012. Thank you for being such wonderful friends and fans.

Note: Not enough people entered for the Giveaway so no winner was selected.

This digital ecard personalized with Smilebox

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Disclosure: I received no compensation for this particular post, though I did write a previous Smilebox post! All opinions and text, however, are my own.

Image Credit: My own.