Holiday Savings
Here are some ways our family celebrates Christmas without digging a hole we're going to have struggle mightily to escape from later:
Wrapping: home-made (brown paper bags rubber stamped or potato stamped) and reusable (we save gift bags and use them again and again for years), and.. this year, I bought brown craft paper for covering school books at a discount store for less than a dollar for a huge roll. I bought twine for .25. We'll have brown paper packages tied up with string.Or skip wrapping and have a follow the clues hunt for treasure.
Gifts: home-made, repurposed, and second hand. We like second hand items for gifts. Here are five gifts small children can help make:
Draw names- the siblings draw names for presents. This year we put a five dollar limit on what gifts to each other can cost. They are excited about the challenge (except the Boy, who likes leggoes as gifts and wants a five dollar limit on his giving, but not his getting. He has some work ahead of him, that boy).
Shop ahead: I look at thrift shops all year long for gifts, for stocking stuffers, for special finds that make suitable presents. I have a stash in my closet.
Focus on relationships, not stuff. Make holidays times for special family traditions- games, baking, singing, crafts, service activities, decorating, reaching out to others (we feel a little let down if the only people at our celebrations are our family members, as part of a celebration to us is including others). These are the things that should make a holiday special, not the loot.
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4 Responses to “Holiday Savings”
September 17th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Another thing I’ve been trying this year is to store up every amazon.com gift code I get – some by Swagbucks, some by answering surveys, some from Coinstar, etc., and that will be my Christmas fund, especially since amazon sells just about everything at this point
Great post – thanks for all the ideas!
September 18th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Trent at The Simple Dollar has started a series of posts with homemade gift ideas. The first one is homemade vanilla extract.
http://www.thesimpledollar.com
September 24th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Great ideas, ladies. Thank-you!
October 6th, 2010 at 2:32 am
Where did you get twine for .25? We’ve been holding off on buying twine for a while, but at that price, we could get some!
Homemade gifts are the norm for us, for both birthdays and Christmas. I have several sewing ideas here and here are mynon-sewing ideas. We’ve made several of them; you can see photos of some in aninterview that I just did this week.
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