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We’re entering the holiday season, and you know what that means - visiting friends and family. Yes, it’s a wonderful time of year. But from Aunt Edna and her long-haired cat, to sleeping on Grandmas’s dusty spare bed, to the hidden food allergens in mom’s famous stuffing - the holidays wreak havoc on your allergies.

To ensure you’re prepared to prevent and treat all of the above (and more), read this great About.com article on dealing with “seasonal” allergies.

Don’t let allergies get you down.

Check out this trailer for the Kirtsy book. I may be the only man in the video—albeit with a pimp hat and feather boa! Do yourself a favor and buy the Kirtsy book:

The women’s blogging revolution has taken hold, and this inspirational and practical guide is a celebration of one of the leading women’s social networking sites on the web. The idea for Kirtsy.com was born during the 2007 Super Bowl, when the self-described “Kirtsy chicks” tuned out the game and tuned into their collective desire to aggregate cool, relevant, interesting, and practical content provided by women for women. Kirtsy.com quickly became a place to find cool things, read smart scoop, connect with exceptional people, and learn about fab products. This guide highlights some of the best postings on the site, including tips and information on travel and leisure, fashion and style, family and parenting, and politics. In addition to illustrating the site’s best content, it also tells the story of how Kirtsy.com became such a huge hit with women around the globe.

The book would make a great Christmas present for any woman. (Disclosure: I am a Kirtsy advisor and a man.)

Here’s a great tool: Sue Shellenbarger, over at the Wall Street Journal, has test drove three time management tools for us, so we don’t have to try them ourselves. Talk about time saving. The three tested methods are:

• Getting things done.
• The Pomodoro Technique.
• Franklin Convey’s Focus.

Read the article to see what she found. We’ve got lots more ways to get things done and hack your life, too.

Want to see what your room would look like with different paint? Check out colorjive.com, a really cool site that takes your pictures and changes the colors of the walls in just a few easy steps. It's fun! And it could save a lot of fails.

More cool design sites.

Over on SmartBlog, Mary Ellen Slayter interviews Olivier Blanchard (above), a seasoned brand strategist at BrandBuilder Marketing. Blanchard delves into his perspective on how businesses can maximize their return on social media. He shares, for instance, three common mistakes companies make when trying to measure the value of social media:

• Focusing too much on digital measurement.
• Not understanding the difference between nonfinancial impact and financial impact.
• Not establishing clear goals and objectives when launching a social media program.

How can you avoid this fate, and what other wisdom can Blanchard share? Check out the SmartBlog piece.

More tips, tricks, and news in social media.

As a newcomer to DC, people keep telling me that my BBQ education is about to begin. Though complete strangers and close roommates have preached the glories of BBQ, this article is the clearest introduction to the sauce I’ve seen yet. Did you know there are at least four kinds of sauce?

• Kansas City Style Sauce
• Texas Style Sauce
• North Carolina Style Sauce
• South Carolina Style Sauce

Check out the article to see just how each of them differ.

Hungry for more? There’s much more about food and recipes.

In case you haven’t seen the controversial goal in the France versus Ireland game, here you go.

Total coverage of soccer.

Most bar dwellers would argue that the phrase “best light beer” is total oxymoron, much like “highbrow Natty Light,” but the dudes over at Men’s Fitness decided to tackle the challenge of finding the tastiest reduced calorie brewskies.

So, what beer leaves the least funky aftertaste while still keeping those rock-hard abs in perfect form? Corona Light, Sam Adams Light and Coors Light all made the grade, while Rock Green Light, Heineken Light and the carb-conscious Michelob Light failed beer yumminess 101. Cruise over to Men’s Fitness for a full list of what beers taste like dirty bath water.

Cheers to beer news.

Over on econsultancy is an interesting Q&A on social media with Julian Sambles, the Head of Audience Development at the Telegraph. According the interview, the Telegraph uses social media to 1) broaden its audience reach and 2) increase reader engagement with the newspaper's editorial. As a result, they've attracted some 75,000 unique visitors per day, solely from social media channels.

I've always wondered about the pay off for newspapers on social media. If the Telegraph is truly pulling in so many readers and also buildling loyalty among online consumers, it looks like there is definite monetary justification for social media presence for newspapers.

More tips, tricks, and statistics on social media.

But what will the neighbors think? The Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducted the first county-by-county obesity survey. And the most obese are:

• Green and Dallas counties in Alabama and Holmes
• Humphreys and Jefferson counties in Mississippi

Looks like they won the potbelly. Check out HuffPo’s article for more on the CDC’s fat findings.