The holiday shopping season has already begun. But why should you have to go out and spend money to get cool new toys? You work hard. Don’t you deserve a freebie? We here at Liliputing certainly thing so, and over the next two weeks we’re going to do our best to help you get something for nothing with a series of holiday gear giveaway contests. Here’s how it works. I’ll be running a series of contests. Each contest will have one prize and one winner. Some of the prizes are leftover goodies that I’ve been sent to review, so they’ll be gently used but generally still pretty awesome. Other contests are sponsored and the winner will receive a shiny new item directly from the sponsoring company. You can enter as many contests as you like, but you can only win once. There will be specific instructions on some of the individual contests, but basically I want to make it as easy as possible to enter and win. That said, the following rules apply to every contest that I’ll be running over the next few eeks:

• You must be 18 years old to enter.
• Winners will be chosen randomly.
• Friends and family members of Brad Linder, Lee Mathews and anyone else directly associated with producing content for Liliputing are prohibited from winning.
• Shipping charges will be covered, but if you are required to pay taxes on contest winnings where you live, you’ll be responsible for taking care of that on your own.
• Each contest will have a start time and an end time. If you don’t get your entry in by the end time, you can’t win. Simple as that.
• By entering, you grant Liliputing permission to publish your name in a roundup of contest winners.

Here are  the contests so far:

• Cool Bananas netbook case from Gearzap – winner: Timm Hackett
• Universal Car Mount from Ultimate-Netbook – winner: Travis Moser
• Asus CrossLink cable – winner: Jason Lassourreille
• Asus O!Play HDP-R1 media streamer – winner: TashKavarish
• Lite-On eTAU208 USB DVD burner – winner: Bill Kilgore
• 16GB Zune HD with NVIDIA Tegra graphics – winner: Laurentiu Pirpiliu
• HP Mini 311 notebook with NVIDIA ION graphics - winner: Alexander Korobov