Preparing for Christmas--Gift Giving
It’s that time of year again! Halloween is over, and the stores have begun trying to convince our kids Christmas is like next week with all the decorations they’ve put up. I absolutely LOVE Thanksgiving and the month of November, but I also am a realist who knows how long and how much work getting ready for the Christmas season can be, so it’s right around this time each year I start getting serious about making a game plan for the next two months. I have realized that the things I love doing the most in December aren’t as enjoyable to me if I also have a huge to do list hanging over my head all month, so I like to spread out the shopping, planning and wrapping over two months to free up more space in December for things like watching cheesy Christmas movies and reading by the light of the tree. In several facebook groups I’m part of the topic of what to get people for Christmas has already come up and I thought over the next two weeks I’d share some ideas on here of how we manage gifts, how we spread out extended family celebrations, what family traditions we hold to tightly and which ones we say no to, and recommendations of gifts in different categories that have been AWESOME for our kids that are NOT plastic toys. If your house is like mine you need exactly ZERO more plastic figurines, legos, things with little plastic pieces that break and go everywhere. I’m banning those gifts this year, we are not buying ANY of those types of toys because I feel like I spend all year picking them up, tossing broken pieces or trying to find some missing arm/leg of a transformer. No more! Instead we’re focusing on things either the whole family can have fun with, or something a little more active than more plastic toys.
Today I’ll talk a little about how we’ve chosen to approach Christmas, and how we spread it out a bit over the course of Christmas week, how we decide what to buy and how we narrow down our shopping so we don’t over-do it for our kids. Later this week I’ll share suggestions of our favorite board games—something that is used literally every single day in our house. Another day I’ll share our favorite books for different ages, and yet another day I’ll share our favorite out door toys (and share some of the things on my wish list for extended family to buy this year because a lot of the things fall in this category). I have a post for you about other gifts we’ve given and received that have been awesome (experience gifts and things that don’t fit easily into one of the other categories). And lastly I have a post about December traditions, how we decide what is important to us and what things we say no to in order to have a non-frantic holiday season. I hope this little mini series is helpful to at least give you a place to start if you’re stuck and if you’re not, well that’s awesome, you can stop reading or keep going :).
So onto today’s topic! I realized early on how easy it was to completely over do it on Christmas—I LOVE shopping for fun things to do with my kids. But I found what happened those first few years of Aidan’s life is that I went way over board buying him gifts and THEN we celebrated Christmas with extended family and we were absolutely overwhelmed with new stuff. We lived in a townhouse the year he was 1.5 at Christmas and I remember sitting there staring at all the new things we had received and just thinking with a completely overwhelmed feeling of “where in the world are we going to put all these things?!” Don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful our kids are SO loved by grandparents and aunties, but it really made me think through what WE buy and give in our own house because I realized early on it was too much to just go shopping with no plan. So we have arrived at a really great system that has worked for our family for about 4 years now and one we will continue this year. First, I pick a day in November when the kids are in school and I start going through the stuff we already have. What have we out grown in terms of toys/books/puzzles that we can donate and move out of the house BEFORE any gifts show up? What toys are just broken or completely unused that we could pass along? I do a pretty big clean up of the kid’s bedroom, making sure things are back where they belong, which makes the influx of things that show up in our house between December and January more manageable—we’ve already purged things, we have space to receive new ones. Also this helps me figure out what we DON’T need more of so I can communicate that to family members who ask.
When it comes to shopping, I make my list early in the fall of what we’d like to get our kids this year. Usually around mid-November I start getting texts/calls/emails from extended family asking what our boys would like this year and I like to have our gifts already chosen by then. We buy our kids 4 gifts each and Santa brings 1 gift per kid and fills their stockings (so really I buy 5 gifts per child)—we don’t use strict categories (although I got the idea of 4 gifts from the “something to wear, something to read, something you want and something you need” system many families use). But having a set number really focuses our decision making and we know they have grandparents, aunts, uncles and great uncles who also buy for them so they do not need mom and dad to buy everything under the sun. (Plus Asher’s birthday is December 26 and Aidan’s is in January) It ends up being too much stuff. This year, each kid will get a new board game, a new book (Aidan’s getting the super cool graphic novel bible that I think he will love, and Asher’s getting a new bible storybook that focuses on God’s promises), and an outdoor game for our family (we’re doing ladder ball and bocce ball). Then Aidan will get a new punching bag because his popped and he LOVED it, and Asher’s getting a building set (because he uses the building materials we have daily). Santa is bringing Aidan a new bike because his is WAY too small and Asher wants Dominoes to build with from Santa. The board games, out door games, dominoes and punching bag are things we will all enjoy together and don’t contribute to any further clutter in their play room which was totally my goal! Santa almost always brings them each a new movie too which are used by all (and fantastic to have for holiday travels!). I take one page in my Simplified Planner and write out what they’re getting and one page for extended family gifts we need to buy and as I think of ideas throughout the fall I just add them to the lists until we have 4 things for each kid (or one thing for each extended family member). Then throughout October, November and December I’ll watch for those things to go on sale and start buying.
We don’t have any family in town, so for Christmas it means we travel a bit, but I actually prefer this because it allows us to spread out the gifts they receive. However, one of the things that was SO important to me when I became a mom was that my kids had the experience of celebrating Christmas in their own house every year with just the 4 of us—no guests. We did this growing up—we would always do Christmas morning just the 4 of us and then got together with extended family later in the holiday week and I am so thankful we had this time just with our immediate family to enjoy gifts, stay in PJs and hang out together. However, being in our own house on Christmas didn’t fit well with how our extended family already celebrated and rotated sharing holidays. SO, we’ve come up with an alternate plan that I actually love. This year, we’ll be in South Carolina with Chuck’s family on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day, but in order to get my Christmas at home it just means we will do it the weekend before—the 22nd or so. We write Santa a letter in November asking him to come early since we won’t be home and Santa will come Saturday morning and when they wake up it will be Christmas at home. The boys will open gifts from us and Santa and we’ll have a “Christmas Day” at home. That gives them a few days to enjoy anything we’ve given them and allows us to do a quiet Christmas with just the 4 of us which was such a high priority for me. After South Carolina, we fly to Minneapolis to spend a week with my family and we’ll do another Christmas gathering there with more gifts. Spreading out the present opening has been awesome, and something I’d highly recommend if it’s at all possible! (And it means I don’t have to haul any gifts for my own kids to anyone else’s house, they’re all opened before Christmas travels begin right in our own home).
How about your family? How do you do gifts for your kids? Do you set a price limit for each child? Do you set a limit on how many gifts each one has? You don’t have to start shopping yet, but what brainstorming can you do now to make life easier for your future self? Maybe start an amazon wish list for each child that you can easily share with family who need gift ideas, or maybe just decide what is the one big thing you’d like to make sure is under your tree Christmas morning. Any baby steps you can take now makes for less to worry about later when extra social events, office parties, and school stuff starts popping up taking over our schedule! Happy brainstorming my friends! I’ll be back in another day or two with a list of fantastic board games for different ages in case you need some ideas for gifts that aren’t toys!
