My husband’s family has hosted a “Christmas in July” party for the last 3 years.
Why Christmas in July? Well, for two reasons.
#1: Weather is often nasty in Upstate New York and New England (where most of Yankee Bill’s family lives) so travel is very uncertain in December.
#2: The pre-Christmas season is usually packed! There are only a limited number of weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas-and between church events, holiday office parties, neighborhood gatherings, and 2 sides of the family to visit (more if you’ve got any parental divorces to take into account). . . .well lets just say that removing one Christmas party and sticking it in relatively open July is a blessing.
Celebrating Christmas in the middle of the summer got me thinking-for a frugalite, this is actually a good time to start thinking about Christmas.
Now don’t get me wrong-I’m one of those people who hate rushing the holidays. I refuse to listen to Christmas carols or do any type of decorating until after Thanksgiving. Yet a big part of being frugal and saving money is planning ahead and buying things on sale. If I waited until after Thanksgiving to do my Christmas shopping I’d be paying top dollar for most of my gifts. It can really pay off to start thinking about the holidays early, as in 6 MONTHS early.
If this isn’t the way you normally plan your holiday purchases (and/or your holiday savings, oh by the way) then I would highly suggest that you try it this year. Sit down sometime in the next few weeks and take a good look at your regular Christmas shopping list. Ask yourself some of the following questions:
#1: Who do I know I need to shop for? (Don’t forget to list folks like school teachers etc if you normally buy for them, or a few “just in case” hostess type gifts if you have that sort of lifestyle. I’ve found that personally I really don’t NEED any “just in case” gifts.)
#2: How much money do I want to spend, approximately, on each gift (or in the case of direct family members, how much do you want to spend total. I know, I know. With the kids there will always be some new “gotta have” closer to Christmas itself for the kiddos on your list. If you want to be sure, you can wait-but just compensate in your budget for the fact that you’ll probably have to pay full price)
#3: What are some ideas for gifts, or some things that I know they like?
Once you’ve got a list, you can keep it in your purse or wallet. Then the next time you see something at a fantastic sale price, you can whip out your list and see if the item would work for anyone on your list. If so, buy it and make a note (so you don’t buy two gifts for the same person-believe me, when you start shopping early it is easy to forget what you’ve already gotten).
Another great thing about starting early is you have time to think about and implement some changes.
Are you spending too much money on gifts for friends or extended family? Well maybe it’s time to start a campaign for a change. Maybe your friends would be happy to either drop the gift exchange or agree to a $5 limit-they all may just be waiting for someone else to bring it up. Or your extended family may be happy to start picking names out of a hat instead of buying each and every of the 47 Aunts, Uncles and Cousins a gift.
In Yankee Bill’s family, we’ve been doing a “Yankee Gift Exchange” (also known as a Chinese Auction) for years. We place a $10 limit on gifts, with each of the kids getting their Christmas present then as well. We do, admittedly, buy Nana (YB’s mom) and Cousin Dom presents for the REAL Christmas, but otherwise our entire cost for his side of the family-all 25 of them, is less than $30. That’s $10 for the gift I bring to the swap, $10 for YB’s, and 2 gifts for the cousins bought at a deep discount earlier in the year. Quite the savings in money, time and energy compared to buying each person a gift.
And lastly, if you are a crafty type, you may need some time to actually MAKE all those awesome gifts you are contemplating for family and friends. Or else feel the need to hand-stamp all of your 369 Christmas cards that you send out annually. Here’s a piece of advice: Start now, trust me. If you wait until November rolls around, you’ll be a stressed out, unhappy mess before Advent is over! (unless you are one of those people who can whip out a sweater in 3 days-then by all means, wait until the last minute)
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve been Christmas shopping year round for almost 10 years now, and it really has helped with my stress levels!
The Yankee Gift Exchange sounds intriguing …
Great ideas!! Thanks do you know what the best gift to give is? Thanks, Annette
We do a Yankee gift exchange for both sides of our family. One side put a $20 limit on theirs and the other one…$50! I don’t even spend that on people I am close to. I actually spoke up three years ago and said I didn’t want to do it anymore, that we financially could not afford to this. It wasn’t just one $50 gift our family had to buy either…each person in our family had to participate. At the time, we only had one child, but it was already $150 just to do one family gift exchange. I told them we could not afford to do it and I think everyone was relieved that someone finally spoke up. We now just bring canned items for a local food pantry and can donate small donations of money to the pantry too. It feels good to do something like that rather than exchanging gift cards of money
Hi… I’ve been enjoying your blog via Bloglines for a few months now. Thanks!
this is off topic…. I wanted to post this question when you had the contest… but … well, I won’t go into why…
Here is is
NAPKINS? paper/disposable versus cloth/washable What do you know about this? Which is a more frugal choice?
Another thing to start thinking about round about now (or in my case year-round) is what you want for gifts. My birthday is December 1st, we have a national holiday on December 5th on which we also swap presents (by drawing names, limit of 15 euro) and then there’s Christmas. So, I keep a running list of things I like to have. When gift season rolls around, all I do is copy the (constantly up-dated) list as my gift list when people ask me what I want to recieve as a gift.
Very handy, I can tell you.
I just wanted to post a little comment to the person who asked about napkins…I live in a community house with 9 adults and 2 kiddos and we’ve found the cheapest and most environemently friendly thing for us to do about napkins is to use cloth. We have 9 different patterns of napkins (once we all put ours together) each person choose what their personal napkin would be. Each night we find our own napkin in the pile, and we use them for about a week then throw them in the wash when we do towells or something. It’s fun because we can be individuals in our napkins but nice because we don’t have to worry about using someone else’s dirty napkin (just our own).
-missy
We’re trying to live frugally this year and starting to think about holiday shopping wasn’t even on my radar here in July–but it should be. Thanks for the gentle reminder. By the way, I think you might like one of my recent postings about great ways to keep gift cards all together, which can help cut down on shopping costs. You can read it here: http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com/2007/06/dont-look-gift-card-in-mouth.html
Thanks! Leah Ingram
I just bought TWO Christmas gifts this past weekend at the thrift store!! ; )
I think these ideas are fabulous!! Thanks. On the napkin issue I have found if you want to prevent costly colds, germs, costly dr. and hospital trips for possibly fatal germs is Cottonelle wipes at your local wholesale wharehouse. They can also be used in the bathroom. They are only $10.00 a case and they have cut our getting colds by at least 50%. They are flushable to flush germs down the toilet. The germs then do not multiply and give you a virus. They may seem costly at first but, medical bills seem to be a #1 budget and credit problem. Take care!! The cloth napkins are good too but, they should be washed every day. Annette Your health is worth it!!!
We don’t have christmaspresents here, we celebrate Sinterklaas during the time up to 5/6 december.
Christmas is more of an introverted celebration. We celebrate life, light etc. without gifts to distract.
When I see something suitable as a present for someone during the year. I buy it.
It can be used as a birthdaygift, a thank you gift, something when someone needs a good gesture, or something for Sinterklaas.
I only buy when we can afford it.
So each year at Sinterklaas I go to the attick and lay out all the presents and pick what I think is best for each and every child and grown-up.
Now everything gets more expensive, we don’t have much and we only have little gifts.
I’m glad everyone found these ideas useful. There really are so very many different ways to celebrate the holidays.
And Jimmie-You’ve already gotten some good info in these comments, but I’ll address the napkin issue soon as well. Stay tuned!