My husband and I purchase Christmas gifts for our nieces and nephew this time of year. We usually don’t send them anything for their birthdays, only because we usually forget or remember too late. Best case scenario: we sometimes remember to send them money. But, the holidays are that special time of year when we make sure that most family members receive something special from us. The adults are usually easy to shop for, a book they’ve mentioned over the past few months, some items they really need, or a family gift of Omaha Steaks or Tender Fillet (this company is really pricey in comparison as we found out!). However, finding meaningful gifts for the kids is challenging.

One reason we find this task difficult is we don’t have children of our own. We’re out of touch with what kids want and we wait until the last minute (or week before Christmas) to find those gifts. Another reason it is difficult finding that special present is we don’t see our nieces and nephew very often. We live in different states and see them maybe once or twice a year. Children’s interests also change frequently; my niece was really into horses last year, she may not be this year. Our almost 17-year-old niece is a little easier to shop for, we can usually send her money and she is thrilled. But the 4-year-old and 8-year-old still enjoy tearing open real presents, not opening a card with money in it.

What my husband and I found this year while shopping, is that many toys are geared towards younger children, at least at Walmart. The selection of toys seemed too childish for my 8-year-old niece. The toys also appeared to be made rather cheaply, meaning they won’t last more than a year or two. So this year we settled on a gift we feel that our niece could use, an art easel with a chalkboard, whiteboard, and large roll of white paper. We feel satisfied with this gift, at least it is promoting creativity.

On the other hand, the gift we choose for our nephew was a last minute, “What are we gonna get him?!” present: a hot wheels trike. A gift he will only use a few times and will soon grow out of. We aren’t completely thrilled with the gift we selected for him, but we were in a panic and that trike was on an end cap!

As soon as we reached the registered, we realized that both gifts were quite large and shipping was going to cost a pretty penny. Yet, we couldn’t take the gifts back to the shelf, so we just sucked it up and factored in the additional cost. I’m sure when I sit down and total up our Christmas present cost, it will be close to $500 or $100 over my original budget. Drats! Note to self: start earlier next year!

Short and Sweet!

Since I’m finishing up my gift jars this evening, and trying to get ready for the last day of school tomorrow, I’m making this post short and sweet. The holiday rush is making me cranky! At last, my husband and I made it to Walmart, not my favorite store, and finished up our gifts for our niece and nephew. We ended up going a little bit over our budget by about $60, but that’s not bad considering we have a total of 12 people to shop for. Our total Christmas figure isn’t completely in yet, but it’s hovering around $460 (I originally had budgeted $400). The one thing I am thankful for, however, is that none of this year’s gifts will be on credit and we won’t be paying for them come July! We did have to purchase wrapping paper since both gifts for my niece and nephew are on the large size and won’t fit in canvas bags, and I don’t have enough newsprint to wrap them in. At least my gift jars come in reusable containers, mason jars. So, I can’t beat myself up too badly!

I’ll be able to think more clearly within the next couple of days and actually post an intelligent article! More to come…

I tell myself every year I’m going to get a head start on Christmas: mail my personalized, decorated cards in a timely manner; make or purchase gifts for co-workers and people who have really helped me throughout the year; complete and ship family gifts no later than at least 10 days before Christmas. It never fails, I’m always late!

As I count down the days until Christmas and I begin to feel harried, a few things have taken importance over purchasing gifts or making my own cards. I can easily use these as excuses for my late start. One of these important things was taking finals for my credential program classes. It was important to me to do my best, study, and make sure I turned in quality work. Another thing that wraps up around the same time as holiday activities is school. For the past many years, I’ve been placed in long-term assignments that require me to teach up until the day the students begin their winter break. When teaching elementary school students this close to the holidays, there are many things that need to be done: holiday parties and organizing food and drinks, helping the students practice singing for their program, completing holiday projects that they need to take home before they go on a 3-week break. All of these activities take some of my mental and physical time away from “getting ready for Christmas.”

With these excuses now coming to a close, next week appears to be more open and I should be able to fully focus on the holidays. OH WAIT! I forgot. I have JURY DUTY next week. Well, that depends on if they will really need me. I purposefully rescheduled my Jury Duty for the week of Christmas in hopes that the courts really don’t want to go to jury right before a major holiday. I did this for my husband last year, and they didn’t need him at all. All he had to do was call in for 2 days and he was relieved of this public service for another 3 years. Hopefully this will work to my advantage as well. Especially since the court I am assigned to is kind of far away and traffic will be really bad next week!

In the end, whatever gets accomplished will just have to be good enough. And next year, I will again promise myself to start early. like before Thanksgiving and not be so frazzled!

The past two Christmases my husband and I have spent Christmas by ourselves, meaning just the two of us. Our immediate and extended family members live between a 2 to 6 hour-drive away, but we prefer to keep this holiday simple and quiet and to ourselves. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have children yet, or it could be that in the past when we’ve spent it with family members, we really didn’t like how they celebrated the holiday. On one side of our family, Christmas has been reduced to tearing open gifts without barely looking at what they’ve just received, the emphasis is on how many gifts can one child receive. In contrast, on the other side of our family, Christmas is a minimalist holiday with heated family arguing throughout the evening (mostly between two select people, my brother and my step-father!)

We’ve talked extensively about how we want to cherish Christmas and celebrate it, especially once we have kids. We don’t want it to be primarily about gifts, we feel it’s better to receive one thoughtful gift rather than 20 silly, thoughtless gifts. But we also don’t want to be Scrooge’s and completely dismiss the holiday altogether. So, we’ve come up with our own celebration for now; keep it simple and special. The past couple of years, we’ve created our own traditions as follows:

• Make a tasty breakfast for two. My husband enjoys cooking and breakfast is his favorite meal. We normally don’t eat breakfast in the mornings together, so this is something special we do on this day.
• Open a few gifts to keep it festive. We still have a few gifts that we open Christmas morning. These gifts are sent to us by our family. We discuss the frivolity of them, or how thoughtful a particular gift was. Then, we watch our cats play with the wrapping paper and boxes, that is almost more fun. (We’re not complete Scrooge’s, we also send our families gifts as well!)
• Call our family members. This works out much better than actually seeing them on this particular holiday. We don’t have to witness the children whining and can truly enjoy talking to them over the phone. Also, my stepfather usually won’t argue with my brother while on the phone, so it’s a much more pleasant conversational atmosphere. I know this sounds awful, our family members are really great almost every other day of the year! However, Christmas brings out the worst in some people, especially in our families.
• Plan an outing for the day. A few times this has equated to going to the movies, sometimes we’ve taken a drive to the beach depending on the weather.
• Make a fantastic dinner. Again, my husband the cook usually plans a delicious meal and we top it off with some beverages, usually of the alcoholic type.

I’m hoping that once we purchase our little house in the valley, we’ll be able to host Christmas at our house in our own tradition, focusing on quality time spent together. In the meantime, we prefer to celebrate it alone and visit family and friends after this holiday.

This week I’m wrapping up my fall semester and studying like crazy for a couple of finals. Then, I get a blessed 5 weeks off from school. I can’t wait for the winter break to rewind and focus on some things that have taken a back seat. However, this past weekend my husband and I realized we had to get our holiday shopping completed so that gifts would reach the intended recipient in time. Over the past year we have simplified our lives and made shopping a low priority. Again, I’ve never really like shopping, so this comes naturally to me. So to purchase our holiday gifts for our family members in the least stressful environment, we decided once again to purchase Omaha Steaks gift packages online. We did this last year and everybody really enjoyed the gifts.

My first draft of the holiday card, I need to redo it!

Since we have a total of four families to buy for, we purchased a gift package for each family. Omaha steaks allows you to pick and choose items to personalize each gift package. Each family purchase ended up costing under $80, so it’s also an affordable way for us to send gifts to our families. We ended up under our $400 budget. And, we ordered using our MyPoints link and earned 2,500 bonus points that we use toward Shell gas cards! We still have one gift each to purchase for our 3 nieces and nephew, and one gift for a stepfather on my husband’s side (we have a lot of step parents and extended families, we are children of divorced parents from the ’70′s!) This week we’ll be able to wrap up these last few gifts and get them mailed out before Christmas comes.

My final endeavor is to create our holiday cards. I wanted to design our own this year based on an art project I picked up from an art teacher. If I can get it finished  in time to send out it will be a nice card with a personal touch. Once the finish the beard, my husband will add the Santa hat to complete the homemade Santa design. This week just happens to be a bit hectic with school wrapping up. Time is just so limited!