How to Enjoy Christmas Without Wrecking Your Finances
Christmas is a joyous time. We want to enjoy it and celebrate with family. Sometimes that works out great! And sometimes we go overboard, spend lots of money that we don’t have, and try to pretend that a big credit card bill isn’t coming in January. And, when it does arrive, Ouch! But it doesn’t have to be that way if we just take a little time to prioritize and plan.
I think it’s important to understand that Christmas, for centuries, wasn’t celebrated with department store Santas, Black Friday deals & Christmas trees piled up with gifts. Up until about a century ago, gift giving was largely limited to giving candy to children and to thank you gifts brought to those hosting a Christmas gathering. That all changed when the catalogue companies (if you’re younger than 40, you probably don’t even know what these were) like Sears decided to try a new marketing campaign & suggested ordering gifts from their catalogue to give as Christmas gifts. It was a huge success! So, since it wasn’t exactly a secret, it was soon copied by department stores & eventually everyone else. Today, this 100-year-old marketing campaign has convinced almost everyone that they’re a bad person if they don’t give a gift to every family member, friend, teacher, co-worker & anyone else they might know.
But if you realize that the gift giving is just the end result of the best marketing campaign ever, you might be able to get your head around scaling back a bit.
The first step for gift giving is to establish a budget for gifts. We should have a monthly budget already, but most of us don’t. So it is important to look at how much you’re already spending each month and assess how much is available to spend on gifts. You should then make a gift giving list including cost, cost of decorations, food, activities, etc. If you don’t budget and plan, then Visa ends up picking up your slack. They’ll be more than happy to lend you the money at 20% interest. Obviously, we should avoid that at all costs. We don’t want to start next year by spending a few months paying off last Christmas, with interest. Once you’ve establish your budget, you may need to scale back a bit on your gift giving list.
If the gift giving has gotten out of control in your household, there are a few steps you can take to get it back under control. First, if you dislike, resent or are stressed out about gift purchasing, you should realize that a lot of people you know feel the exact same way. So, the first step is to reach out to your family, work associates or to your gift giving friends and suggest a cutback to the gift giving. If you’re feeling bold, suggest a nice lunch together (or a small party) & an elimination of the gift giving altogether. After all, you might say “we all have everything we need. So, wouldn’t it be better to spend some time together at a lunch instead?” If they can’t get their heads around a total elimination of gift giving, then you could suggest everyone draw names and have each person purchase one gift for the person they drew. Establish a dollar limit for the gifts so that everyone knows what’s expected. You might be hesitant to be the one to broach this subject, and you might run into a person here and there that just LOVES the gift giving part. But the vast majority of people will really appreciate it. When we broached this subject, with the various groups we mentioned above, everyone was in total agreement & reflected their appreciation of not having to stress out over the excess gift giving. On the family side, we did still give gifts to the kids in the family, but kept to an agreed upon maximum amount. As they grew older, we reduced giving to the kids to a drawing of names.
Another way to go is to give differently. For work associates, we started baking cookies, brownies and various other treats. We combined them together in tins we purchased at Dollar Tree & handed them out. Think about how inexpensive baking ingredients are, like flour & sugar. This is a very inexpensive way to give gifts & it’s often appreciated more than some gadget or gift card we pick up online or at a store. As we probably realize, most of the typical gifts are thrown into a drawer or re-gifted. The gift receiver likely did not really appreciate your efforts very much at all.
Now for your immediate family. You may feel obligated to be very generous to show your undying love for everyone. But, in reality, not everyone loves gifts. In the book “The Five Love Languages”, by Gary Chapman, there are five ways that people experience love. Each person has a primary way that they feel loved. One of those ways is, in fact, Receiving Gifts. But the other four are Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch and Acts of Service. So, for those members of your family that don’t perceive love when they’re given gifts, a lot of the gift giving is wasted. A really fun date night (Quality Time), cleaning the house for them (Acts of Service) or a long letter of love and appreciation (Words of Affirmation) might be received much more positively. And for those that feel love through physical touch, coupons for back rubs (or something else 🙂 ) might be quite a winner!
For next year, once you know how much you need for Christmas, you can start saving 1/12 of what you need each month in a separate savings account. Then you’ll have your Christmas money when you need it next December. Wouldn’t that be great!
If you’re having challenges with your personal finances & the holiday season is already looking like a financial train wreck, click here to setup time to discuss how financial coaching can make 2023 better. We can get to know each other better and find out if coaching is a fit.
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