Frugal Fridays – Just Say No to Christmas

Well, not really.

It’s more like “just say no to the insanity surrounding gift giving over the holidays”, but that was WAY too long to use as a title.

This is a tough one; even with unemployment, under-employment, insecure employment, inflation, and all the other things that keep most of us on the financial straight and narrow, when it comes to holiday gift giving, it’s far too easy to drop our frugality like a rock.

Maybe we’re trying to hide our financial situation from our kids. Maybe we’re trying to create holidays filled with “magic and wonder” for them. Maybe we’re trying to re-create the Christmases of our own youth.

Maybe we’re just big ol’ suckers for our kids.

Or maybe we haven’t really gotten our priorities in order yet, and the “Christmas Machine” is a stronger lure than our own convictions of conscientiousness.

So for today, Black Friday, I’m taking this Frugal Friday opportunity to suggest that one of the best Frugal decisions we can make is to explore our motives behind Christmas extravagance. 

Children don’t need a ton of toys to be happy. I found an interesting article, “7 Secrets of Highly Happy Children”, and found it telling that not once  were expensive doo-dads mentioned. This lined up with other articles about children’s happiness I read, that all had two things in common:

children are happiest when they experience unconditional love and have time to spend with their families. 

Not when they are overwhelmed by the sheer number of toys under the tree.

Our children don’t NEED 42 boxes of prettily wrapped treats to open on Christmas morning to feel magic and joy. They don’t need to have so many toys they cannot possibly remember their own personal toy store inventory.

What they do need, and lots of it, is time to play, time to hang out with their families, and a gigantic slathering of unconditional love on a daily basis. 

All of that is free to give, and would provide a greater source of happiness for our children than whatever the newest, bestest gadget or toy ever could.

Besides, how can we teach our children financial responsibility when we’ve shown such flagrant disregard for fiscal facts in exchange for momentary joy? We can’t. We simply can’t.

The same goes for the adults in our lives who are our gift recipients. Most of them are more interested in spending time with us than they are in whatever “goody” we present to them on Christmas morning.

Sure, for some people, ‘gift-giving’ is part of how they express their love; but that doesn’t mean we must ignore our desire for frugality and responsibility! In fact, that’s a call to engage our minds and use some creativity!

What I’d like to encourage us to all do today is to stop and THINK. Think about why we want to give so many gifts, what we could do to cut back on the volume of gifts while increasing the value of those gifts, and how we can create magic and joy in the holidays for our kids without breaking the bank.

Some ideas:

Utilize Advent calendars. Make the month a countdown, with NO GIFTS attached to the days! Instead, attach an activity or a conversation starter to each day until Christmas, which will give you more time to spend with your kids and something to do or talk about.

Have a family gift. Have your kids brainstorm ideas of something you could give as a family to a group or person in your community. On Christmas morning, let THAT be the “big gift” to open. The parents decide which gift to give from the ideas the kids help generate, and on Christmas morning the kids get to find out what they were able to give.

Some things I’ve heard of along these lines were new sports equipment for a local soccer team that was underfunded, Christmas gifts for the children in an impoverished family, and a months worth of groceries for a single mother.

Allowing the children to experience the entire family giving something so highly valued and appreciated as a unit gave them a greater thrill than opening their own gifts Christmas morning.

Give memberships instead of toys. If your children are really interested in animals, give them annual tickets to the Zoo. Science? The Science Museum. Give them the tickets, and a promise that you WILL fulfill: to take them there at least once a month for the next year. They will appreciate that time and experience more than a new video game, by far.

Give them coupons. “Good for one ‘date’ with Mom.” “Good for one trip to the ______.” Give your kids a coupon book of specific experiences they can call in that require you and your attention. Remind them of their coupon books throughout the year, and when issued a coupon by your child? Fulfill the promise. They’ll love it!

Follow the “it was good enough for Jesus” approach. This one might be hard to do if you already have older children who are accustomed to many presents under the tree, but might be useful for those of us with smaller kids. This approach says three gifts were all that Jesus was given on his birthday; so three gifts is good enough for our kiddos, too.

Some people go even further, making it one thing they want, one thing they need, and a book to read…or some other variation. This approach automatically holds us back from spending a fortune on gifts and encourages thoughtfulness in our gift giving.

Implement the “Santa Toy Exchange”. If you “do” Santa Claus in your house, tell your kids that Santa will always bring presents to children around the world, but that he also does something really, really cool: he collects toys that are in good condition but are no longer wanted from privileged children and gives them to children whose parents can’t afford to buy them toys, in addition to the gifts from him.

Then have your kids go through their toys and gather all unwanted or unused toys and put them underneath the tree before bed on Christmas Eve. The next morning, those old toys will be replaced with new gifts (which magically happens overnight when you put them all in the trunk of you car to take to the donation center).

This one is excellent, because it teaches charity and giving, while also decreasing clutter. Win-win!

Encourage – and give – handmade gifts. Look for things you can make for your family, for your children, and for your friends. Help your children find and make things for their gift-giving opportunities. Learning to make something beautiful, useful, and valuable will be a self-esteem booster for your kiddos, not to mention an excellent opportunity to spend time together and teach them about financial responsibility.

Forget gifts altogether! I worked with a lady once who explained that her parents never gave gifts to their kids for birthdays or Christmas. Instead, they put a deposit into a bank account for their children (all six of them!). When each child turned 18, they went shopping with their kids…HOUSE SHOPPING. Whether the child was going to college or trade school, wherever they planned to spend the next few years of their life, their parents were able to turn that (now hefty) bank account over to the kiddo as a down payment on a home.

This lady and her siblings each then rented out the rest of the rooms in the house to cover the mortgage, and upon graduation, they had a house either entirely or mostly paid off all to their very own. They were able to either keep the home and leverage it for more real estate ownership, or kick out their roommates and have a home to live in while they started their careers that only cost them taxes and insurance.

It was downright inspiring to me to hear such excellent financial education from this lady, and, in fact, she and her 5 siblings were ALL doing very well financially in their adult years. Even the ones who wound up in lower paying fields than their siblings didn’t truly need  to work for their money; they had learned about investments and being frugal and wise from their parents, and all of them were able to pursue careers they loved, regardless of the paycheck.

If that’s not a gift worth giving, I just don’t know what is!

*****

There are tons of sites with information about how to “unplug the Christmas machine”, and I have no desire to summarize all the data available in one single post. In fact, there are whole books written about this subject!

I’m also not saying we shouldn’t spend ANY money on gifts! In fact, some of the suggestions I offered could be quite expensive!

This Frugal Friday I just want to encourage awareness, thoughtfulness, and a full exploration of what we all truly want from the holidays for our family, and how we might be able to achieve that in a frugal, responsible way.

Let’s just think about what we do this Christmas, and make sure our actions line up with our beliefs.

After all, spending time with our kiddos on handmade gifts sounds like a lot more fun than being trampled in a Black Friday stampede, doesn’t it?

Hope that helps!

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How does your family handle Christmas giving? What cool traditions do you have?