19
Dec
Avoiding the holiday buying frenzy
With Christmas just around the corner (amazing how that happened so fast!) it is probably too late to change anyones spending patterns, but I wanted to mention how my wife and I have (partially) avoided some of the holiday buying frenzy eating into our savings.
We both have huge families. My wife literally has 40 family members who live within a 10 mile radius of where we live. I have about that many family members in Southern California alone. For years we have had an agreement with our extended families that once you pass a certain age (like moving out of the house), the family doesn’t really buy you gifts anymore. It’s worked well, and we’re fine with that.
But there are still siblings, parents, grandparents, nieces, nephews, etc. to think of. Every year for the last several years, all the siblings have gotten together and pretty much agreed with the policy that we have had with our extended families. We buy gifts for the kids, but not for each other. Prior to that we all had these wish lists that we would send out, and people would dutifully shop from our wish lists and ho hum money and stuff would trade around. This always worked in favor of me since I was the youngest with the least money. I would get the best gifts and give the cheapest - but it made me feel like I wasn’t being generous enough (which, in retrospect, I often wasn’t.)
So we are down to just buying gifts for the little ones. Here I know there is still going to be some discrepancies. My wife and I believe in living simple. We are going to buy a couple toys and some clothes for each of the little ones, and that’s about it. We both know, however, that our siblings, and especially the grandparents, are going to go overboard. They always do. We love the generosity of our siblings, but it doesn’t always agree with the lifestyle that we’ve chosen for ourselves, and when we only give a few gifts and our little one gets so many in return, it does make us feel bad sometimes. But at the same time, we have to stick with what we believe in.
So we often supplement with homemade gifts. I have no idea how these are received, but we do spend a lot of time on them. This year we are considering making homemade chalk for our niece and nephew made out of the letters of their names. And we’re going to make a DVD of all the pictures and movies that we have of each of them and give those to the parents.
Overall, we’re probably going to spend about $150-$200 on Christmas for everyone else. That’s a much better number than in years past. On each other, we also usually do homemade gifts, although I have already bought my wife something for $100 (that we’ve been talking about getting anyway, so in some ways it doesn’t count as a gift, right? =)
So don’t be afraid to talk to your family about reducing gift giving to just little ones or something like that. Most people would be happy to not have to rush around so much, and focus on a few people well instead of a lot of people poorly.
