Make magic with the Portable North Pole

This is the first year we’ve participated in the Portable North Pole (PNP) and we’re already huge fans. POD on the cusp of turning five and still believes in Father Christmas but it’s great to keep the magic alive by creating something special. If you’re not familiar with the concept, PNP is a magic console used by Father Christmas and his elves that enables you to send carefully crafted videos to loved ones.

As POD’s fifth birthday is on 25th December we opted for Christmas and birthday greetings – she’ll be so pleased to see an elf choir singing Happy Birthday to her! There are free PNP videos available (with 5 personalisations to choose from) although the Gold Pass is brilliant as it offers so much choice. Included in the bundle are unlimited videos (15 personalisations available for each!), unlimited calls and unlimited HD downloads. It means we can make magic and encourage better behaviour through the subtle messaging available.

One of our biggest challenges with POD at the moment is getting her to sleep before 10pm! So we thought we’d put PNP to the test with a surprise call from Father Christmas today – she was thrilled to receive it! POD took on board everything he said even when he casually mentioned she should listen to her parents! We’ve got a second call scheduled and we’ve also created POD’s first video which focuses on visiting an elf’s house. The video is quick and easy to produce and the quality is excellent. The personalisations available with the Gold Pass are fantastic. It’s great value at £9.99 with PNP donating 5% of the proceeds to 40 children’s charities world wide as well.

How does PNP work? 

Amazingly you can create your own personalised PNP video in just a few clicks. With the Gold Pass you get more facetime with Father Christmas, the extra personalisation options plus the ability to include more photos and scenes from his village. A nice, almost nice or naughty verdict can be incorporated as well – the latter isn’t available on the free version.

There are 7 films to choose from – visit an elf house, tour the post office (taster below), a song just for you, secret places, Christmas Eve, movie star and premium birthday. Each of the videos is 5 minutes in length with Christmas Eve and the premium birthday message shorter.

We selected visit an elf house as POD’s first video but we’re actually doing a few to build up the excitement. No doubt it will be at fever pitch before too long. To create a video all we had to do was add her details (first name, photo, sex, age), a bit about her daily life and whether she’d been nice, almost nice or naughty. We opted for ‘almost nice’ to encourage POD to sleep earlier and progress onto the nice list – which she will of course! Then we added a couple of her friends and that was it. The video took less than five minutes to create (including photo uploads) and once finished we emailed it so it’s all ready to go. We can also download the HD version as many times as we like.

Calls take no time at all to create and they’re so worthwhile, the look on POD’s face was just priceless! Further content such as online games, birthday and Christmas Eve messages are available as well with PNP greeting cards available from Tesco. These can be sent with a special personalised video message which is accessed by a unique code. Head over to the PNP website for more information. You can also follow them on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

Disclaimer: We received PNP Gold Pass bundle for the purpose of this review. Opinions are as always our own.