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It's the holiday season, and we're getting in the spirit with our third annual 15 Days of Holiday Giveaways! Every day for the first 15 days of December, one of the PopSugar Network sites — plus our sister sites PopSugar Shop, Fashionologie, and ShopStyle — will feature a new fabulous giveaway.

For our eighth day of holiday giveaways, we are giving away a $1,000 gift card to Williams-Sonoma, one of our favorite stores. We're making it easier than ever for you to get your ultimate holiday wish list from Williams-Sonoma this year.

This giveaway has ended.

After you enter our giveaway above, don't forget to enter SavvySugar's giveaway to win a Lenovo U300 Ultrabook powered by Intel, CasaSugar's giveaway of $1,000 to Design Within Reach, PetSugar's giveaway of three Limited Edition iRobot Roomba 780s, GeekSugar's giveaway of two Xbox Kinect prize packages, BuzzSugar's giveaway of a year of movie tickets for you and a friend from MovieTickets.com, and BellaSugar's giveaway of $2,000 to Saks Fifth Avenue. We will be revealing more amazing giveaways every day, so come back daily and enter them all. Good luck and happy holidays!

• Why potatoes, popcorn, and sourdough bread are good for you — Vegetarian Times
• Match the holiday food lyric with the right Christmas carol! — The Daily Meal
• TV Guide maybe just revealed the winner of Next Iron Chef — Grub Street NY
• 100 Italian food phrases you should know — Food Republic
• How to keep peeled potatoes from turning brown — MyRecipes
• Best restaurants of 2011: do you agree? — Eater
• Kogi BBQ founder Roy Choi on opening a Caribbean restaurant — The Daily Beast
• 3 easy roasts for the holiday table — Real Simple

Salt is one of those essentials in any kitchen, and it can take any dish from OK to amazing with just a quick sprinkle! This holiday season, spend just a few hours making your very own flavored salts for an easy edible gift. The process is simple and the possibilities as to the flavorings are pretty endless. I made three different varieties including roasted garlic salt, meyer lemon salt, and shiitake salt.

The roasted garlic and meyer lemon salts both took a little longer to make, but the shiitake one's incredibly simple and would work with just about any dried herb, from dried mushrooms to chili flakes to rosemary. When combining a salt with a flavoring that is a little more moist like roasted garlic or citrus, you will need to dry it out in the oven for a short period.

I must admit out of my three, I fell in love with my roasted garlic salt; the flavor is more complex than your average garlic salt and is epic on french fries. The meyer lemon salt is more mild but perfect for fish, chicken, and basically anything that needs a hint of citrus. The shiitake version has a very distinct aroma and would be delicious sprinkled on a soup or any dish with mushrooms. Pick up a box of kosher salt at your local market and start concocting your very own flavored salts this holiday season.

Get these incredibly easy recipes when you read more.

All that holiday gifting is only half the merriment of the holidays. The rest of it — in our opinion, at least! — comes from the joy of making and savoring special holiday treats that only come once a year. The minute Thanksgiving passed, we move on to dreaming about all the holiday dessert possibilities, and there are simply too many on our to-make list to name. From gingerbread cookies to peppermint patties, we'll be cooking up a storm, but one thing's for sure: it isn't the holidays without these no-bake date balls. We hope you'll give them a try and add to your holiday cookie rotation, too!

• See our recipe for no-bake coconut date balls

This year, we're also adding to our holiday baking traditions: we're taking part in Food Network's first-ever virtual cookie swap, where some of the web's best food destinations have gathered together to share their favorite cookie creations. See what the rest of our friends are swapping at this virtual cookie exchange when you read more.

This year, we're not the only ones in the mood for a little less sugar and a little more spice. Food Orleans shares an ingenious recipe for pepper jelly rugelach.

Welcome to the third installment of my Christmas Hannukah bake-a-thon!

Have you ever had rugelach? Ever heard of them? They're these awesome, petite crescents of cream cheese and butter dough wrapped around a filling such as cinnamon, nuts, or preserves. The fact that the dough is almost nothing but cream cheese and butter pretty much had me hooked.  But I also saw an opportunity to inject a little deep-south peppery twist on this classic cookie.

Pepper jelly. You know, the jalapeno-spiked stuff that gets poured over blocks of cream cheese? Turns out it's a remedy for someone who bakes and eats lots of cookies and, quite frankly, needs a little help preventing palate fatigue (that's Melissa Clark's term, not mine, but it's well-put). I was afraid these might be too spicy in the end, but they're just spicy enough, and a welcome change of spice from the typical holiday range of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg. I think you'll like them.  And let's forge ahead and put pepper jelly in all kinds of sweet things!  It'll be a revolution.

For a recipe sure to stun at your next cookie exchange, read on.