Ahhh. The Christmas season. That special time of year when we all run around like chickens with our heads cut off to find the perfect gifts for our family and friends. My wife and I spent the weekend trying to do as much of our Christmas shopping as possible. I am happy to report that we just about finished all the gift buying. The majority of our time was spent focusing on gifts for our nieces and nephews, with just a little bit more time spent buying gifts for our family gift exchange.
For as long as I can remember, we have always put everyone’s names in a hat at Thanksgiving and then everybody draws one name. Whomever you draw is the one adult person in the family that you buy a gift for. This makes perfect sense to me, and since I have been doing this my entire adult life, it just feels right too. By only buying for one person, it helps everyone save money and keeps Christmas from becoming this massive gift buying orgy. Of course we also buy presents for people in our immediate family. I will be buying my wife and gift, and she will be buying me one as well, although we both decided to minimize the dollar amount since we have been spending so heavily finishing the lake house. This is only for the adults. All the adults buy gifts for all the nieces and nephews but we tend to keep the dollar amount around $25 or so per child. Since my younger sister had twins earlier this year the total “niece/nephew” count is up to 8. Even with a conservative $25 per child, it starts to add up quickly. The main thing is that, with these limits in place, we will have a “cash only” Christmas again this year. I feel badly for all those people out there that are spending their way through Christmas, only to have a minimum payment hangover on their credit cards for all of next year.
Anyway, we are happy to report that we are almost done shopping. We still have a few things to pick up, but we will plan on doing that during the week as we have time.
On another note, my wife has decided to stop teaching piano lessons. She is finding that it is too much to work all day and then come home to teach piano for an hour a couple days per week. That will reduce our income by a couple hundred dollars per month, but it should not be a big deal.
