Chocolate Letters & Medallions Should Arrive Early November
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

Chocolate Christmas letters will be sent around November 1. If you like to give letters for stocking stuffers, you might want to get over here quite soon after they arrive as certain letters disappear rapidly. Just like last year we will get more dark chocolate letters than light. Woudstra's usually get in more milk chocolate letters and, in the past, didn't have many dark. We try to compliment each other, when possible. We will also be getting in some new chocolate medallions. In our move we sold all the Dutch chocolate that we had on hand, so any chocolate you buy from us will be nice and fresh. We will not be getting in as much chocolate as last year, but we will be getting in some sea salt caramel. That seemed to be everyone's favorite. (If we don't sell it all, Lee and I finish it off after Christmas).

Finding our New Location
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

We still use the same open/closed sign here as we did at the store. We are trying to stay with the same hours, although I do have to admit, we have closed a few times when Lee and I have schedule conflicts. We don't have enough traffic to warrant hiring someone to stay here when we have something else going on. If you don't want to make a wasted trip, give us a call at 712-737-8920, first to make sure that we are here. This past month we took a bank trip to St. Paul for two days and spent the last Friday and Saturday delivering some things to my Uncle and Aunt in the Black Hills.

"New" Used Books
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

Over the weekend, we visited my Uncle and Aunt, Jon and Nila Boone, in Rapid City, SD. While there we found some great sales at both the Rapid City library and at Jon and Nila's activity center. We came home with two boxes of "new" books to sell. I haven't checked them out myself yet, but there are always some great reads in what Jon sends us.

Sorting through things at the old Store
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

We haven't sold the building that used to house Jubon Juweelen, but I think it is a blessing in disguise. I go over every day for a little while and sort through things. I'm trying to go through everything before we move it so I won't have so much work with things once they get to the new location. We lost our renter with the last rains (never had water problems before, but I understand that most people in Orange City did once the ground got saturated). We have a very nice apartment downstairs that we usually have rented out, however, since the last rains, we are reluctant to rent it out because we don't want a renter to have to deal with water again. Therefore, we are using the apartment to put a lot of things that we had at the store and didn't have a clue what we were going to do with them. We have several pallets that we are going to lay down first so that if we would get water, our good stuff won't get wet. We plan on even having a place where Lee can do woodworking down there. I still think the store would be an ideal location for an antique store in Orange City. We have no antique place and people are used to coming here to search for antiques. In fact, I had a man from Boone, Iowa come to our new location looking for more antiques. We have a few things left, but not enough to interest most people. An Antique magazine that we used to advertise in called the other day and I said at this time, we wouldn't be putting an ad in, however, I took their number and if anyone is interested you could still get the information in for next year.

Perusing our guestbook
By Owner: Bonnie Meier

We still have the same podium outside our door at our new location that we had at our old one. I try to encourage everyone to sign our guest book. Since September 24, we have had people sign in from Illinois, South Dakota and several places in Iowa.