The holiday season will soon be upon us. If you find yourself stressed out every holiday season by financial and time demands, now is the time to decide that this year will be different. Now is the time to decide on a giving holiday. Not only will you benefit, but your kids will as well.
Last time we talked about teaching your kids to give during the holidays, and this time we’ll talk about the second part of creating a giving approach to the holidays–teaching your child to have reasonable expectations for presents.
Years back, the holidays weren’t simply a time to get-get-get. As a girl, I loved reading Little House on the Prairie, and I was always amazed by how delighted Laura was by the simple presents she received. One year it was a tin cup and an orange. Another year it was a corn cob doll. Now, our kids receive oodles of presents and still demand more and are disappointed when the present opening is over.
How to Set Reasonable Expectations
If you’re the parent of older children and you previously gave them too many presents, you might sit down with them well before the holidays and let them know that they won’t be getting as much this year. You can explain that you want to focus more on giving rather than receiving. Plan on some resistance, but if you hold firm and continue to treat holidays this way, your kids will adapt.
If you’re children are younger, you can start the tradition of a simpler Christmas now. Your kids may express some resentment as they age and see how much their peers are getting, but if it’s your family tradition, they will likely understand.
How Many Presents to Give
You and your significant other will need to decide what works best for your family.
Some families decide on a dollar limit per child and don’t go over that amount. This is the way that my mom always handled Christmas for my brother and I, but she carried it a step further and made sure that we each got an equal number of gifts, too.
Other families say that Jesus received 3 gifts from the Wise Men, so they give their kids 3 gifts for Christmas. Another take on this is to give your child 3 specific presents–something they want, something they need, and something they’ll wear.
In our family, we are blessed with grandparents and godparents that give our children many presents. So, we buy our children very little for Christmas. The one time we did buy our kids a lot of Christmas presents, they simply received too much.
Finally, some families take an extreme approach and don’t exchange presents at all. Instead, they donate all the money they would have spent to charity.
If your children are already used to lavish holiday celebrations, scaling back may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. First teaching children to be givers and then scaling back may help ease the transition for your child.
How do you determine how many presents to buy your child? Do you worry about going overboard with gift giving?
Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.
Holiday shopping is in full swing now, and you may be feeling the financial pressure. Shane recently quit his job and is working on a tight holiday budget. My husband and I are in the midst of being gazelle intense, so we don’t have much extra money for gifts. Yet even though we don’t have much money to spend this holiday season, I feel great about what we are giving because we are not overspending. We can truly afford what we are giving. Instead of overspending, we are empowering ourselves by spending exactly what we are able to spend. Follow these tips to rein in your holiday purchases this season:
-Freeze the credit cards.
Literally. Put them in water and freeze them. Better yet, put them in peanut butter as we did. Vow not to use your credit cards this month. There is nothing worse than opening your credit card statement and staring at the large number you now owe. The presents have been opened, the holiday is over, but you still owe for the holidays. If, instead, you put the credit cards away, you have nothing to dread come January.
-Set a budget and fund it with cash.
Determine exactly how much you have to spend and withdraw that money from your bank account. Pay for every purchase with cash. Feel the pain as you part from the cash. Acknowledge what you are spending, and feel empowered that you are sticking to your budget. If you want to shop online, get a debit card. Just avoid using credit cards.
-Shop the bargains
There will be plenty of deals to come this holiday season. Stay focused on the deals and only buy items you can get on sale. Take advantage of buy one get one free sales such as buy one toy of a certain brand, get the second toy from the same brand free.
-Buy sets
For children, especially young children, buy toys that come in sets such as a baby doll with a stroller and a high chair. Take those out of the package and break them into three different presents for the price you paid for the bundled gift.
-Look in unconventional locations
My children get presents from Santa and from me and my husband. Since they were little, the toys that get from us are often gently used. I shop garage sales throughout the summer and hide gifts away. This year my three year old will get a new in the box baby doll that I picked up at a garage sale for $3. My son will get a wooden box with five different games in it that I found at a garage sale for $5.
Obviously you may not have time to go to (or even find) garage sales now, but you can shop children’s resale stores for quality toys at a steep discount.
They say ‘tis better to give than to receive, and that is true more so when what you give is what you can afford. Why not enjoy watching your family open their presents this Christmas without worrying where the money will come to pay for everything in January. It is possible. Beating Broke and I are both proof of that.
Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.
Have you ever watched your family open up Christmas gifts while mentally calculating how much each gift cost and comparing that against the amount you have in your checking? Have you dreaded opening the bills in January because you know the credit card statement from holiday shopping will be coming soon and you do not have the money to pay the balance in full? When my husband and I were newly married and dirt poor, we carefully planned our Christmas purchases to fit within our meager budget. We didn’t buy many gifts, but the ones we bought were well thought out. When we went to visit my mom over the holidays, she kept telling us about all of the presents she had bought for us. There were so many under the tree! Because we are the only people to buy gifts for my mom because my dad has passed, we started feeling guilty about the few presents we bought her. Noticing that her bathroom towels were worn, we went out Christmas Eve night and bought her an entire set of 6 new bath towels including hand towels and washcloths with money we did not have. Then we bought her some jewelry. We charged everything knowing we didn’t have the money to pay.
On Christmas morning, she delighted in her presents. When we opened ours, we were in for a surprise. She too had bought a few well thought out gifts for us. But all those extra gifts we found under the tree? They were leftover t-shirts from a conference some of the professors had hosted at the university where she works. She bought them for a $1 each. Each time I or my husband opened another one of those presents that contained a t-shirt, I felt sick. We had put ourselves in debt to try to make sure our presents were equal to hers, but she had stuck to her financial budget by giving us “filler” presents. There had been no need to buy those extra gifts on Christmas Eve. . .
We worked like crazy selling off things in our apartment such as textbooks we no longer used so that we could pay off those credit cards used to buy the extra gifts. On our meager salary, it took us until March. Thankfully, we have learned our lesson.
If you don’t want to spend the months after Christmas worrying how you will pay off the new debt you just acquired, consider having a no spend month now. We still have nearly three months until Christmas. Pick a month such as October or November to drastically reduce your spending.
If you normally spend $1000 a month on groceries, gas, entertainment, eating out, toiletries, etc., decide how much you want to cut that amount. Maybe you will decide that in October you will only spend $500 a month. To make up the difference, perhaps you won’t eat out or you will eat from the pantry to use up those groceries that have been on the shelf for awhile. Maybe you will do something for free as a family rather than catching the latest movie.
By reducing your spending for just 4 weeks, you will be able to come up with a good amount for your holiday gift giving. If you normally spend $1000, but only spend $500 of that in October, you now have $500 saved for holiday gift buying. Yes, you sacrifice now, but it will be well worth it when you know that every present under the tree has been paid for. Best of all, there is no reason to dread the bills in January. Isn’t that a great way to start the new year?
Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.
