As we all gear up for the holidays – three more weeks! – I thought I’d share a few ideas and ways we try to simplify our holiday season.
Typically one of the most costly parts of the holidays, gifts can be a wonderful part of the season! But they can also get out of hand – both for my sanity and my budget, it’s important to keep things in check.
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Letter exchange: My mom’s family is big. And most of us have young families and not a lot of money – so my aunt had the idea to do a letter exchange in lieu of gifts one year. Each family gets assigned to write letters to another family. It was a really nice break from the pressure of finding gifts for everyone – but also involved generosity of time and thoughtfulness.
Cap your spending: Consider talking with friends or family members about how much you plan to spend on each other. This can be really awkward – especially if certain family members tend to spend way more on gifts than you do. But, transparency can also be freeing – telling my siblings how much I usually spend on them makes them more comfortable to spend similarly.
Give Less: Personally, I’d rather get one awesome, ethically produced gift than a slew of cheap stuff that I probably don’t need and will end up tossing or giving away within a year. Less truly is more when it comes to holiday gift giving. I know, I know, it’s fun to shower people with a bevy of wrapped goodies!
Handmade Gifts: I’ve had a wonderful time in years past giving my family gifts I sewed for them. I thought of them while making it, and it was so much fun to create all the gifts myself. If you have any crafting ability, consider putting it to use. Or try your hand at making bath salts or candles in jars as gifts. With some fabric scraps and ribbon – it can look absolutely gorgeous!
Heeeey, old school photos. Cira 2007.
Edible Gifts: Food mixes in jars make fabulous presents. I’ve heard raving reviews about these brownies. Soup mixes, hot cocoa mixes, and coffee mixes are great ideas for jars, too. I also love candy for Christmas! Fudge and caramel turtles are my favorite Christmastime candies to make to give as presents. For coworkers and grandpas, I put lots of candy in pretty tins or boxes. Edible gifts are my favorite for people who seem to have everything – everyone eats! (And since I’m a bit of a crazy minimalist, I like consumable gifts because they won’t become clutter.)
Exchange Time, Not Things: I really only exchange gifts with my immediate family, but my family always hosts a big post-Christmas party for my extended family. And I usually see all my friends over the winter break – which I enjoy more than gifts, to be sure. I’m sure my grandparents would prefer coming over to dinner at our apartment to getting yet another tchotchke from us.
Reduce the Wrapping: Wrapping paper is ridiculously wasteful. We throw away four million tons of wrapping paper annually in the US. Please, please consider wrapping your gifts in reusable shopping totes, newspaper (the comics!), or wrapping paper made from recycled materials. Most wrapping paper isn’t recyclable, so it goes straight to the landfill. You can still make your gifts pretty with Reusable Gift Wrap.
Most of all : Decide what you care about most – you can’t do everything 110%.
What is your favorite part of the holiday season? What warms your heart the most and gives you warm fuzzies? Decorations? Christmas tree? Making every gift from scratch? Baking dozens of Christmas cookies? Spending lots of time with family? Picking out the perfect gifts, no matter the cost?
It may sound like an idyllic holiday to do ALL THE THINGS, but you must know yourself and your strengths, in my case, I love to visit the paint store in los angeles ca to get some amazing pieces for the season. (And the reality of your season of life – toddlerhood? working full-time? taking care of a sick parent?) Pick what is most important and run with it. But we can’t expect so much of ourselves that it becomes a wholly stressful affair. If it’s too much, stop doing it all.
Be realistic and kind with yourself.
hello!
i wish a wonderful holiday and new year for you and for your family.
in here we don’t have new year holiday, just first day of the year.
by the way nice gift ideas…
love…
Yes! I currently have three gallons of vodka sitting in my pantry soaking up 24 vanilla beans just waiting to become vanilla extract. Lots and lots of vanilla extract!
I’m not necessarily 100% on board with handmade, but last year I made it a point to buy from either Etsy or from small business. So even if it’s something that’s made in China, I want it to support the bottom line of a business owner whom I could, in theory, meet if I really wanted to. As opposed to the CEO of, you know, Target or Best Buy.
I love all your other tips too! :)
The thing for me is that handmade gifts take so much more time and effort and energy and by the time I’m finished I often feel like I have met the requirement of a handmade gift but I don’t have a gift that the person will love or flip head over heels for, because my handmade gift, the kind I can actually make successfully, is a one-size-fits-all gift, which is obviously MY failure and not the failure of the idea of a handmade gift. (Also, a failure of my limited crafting skills.)
I so wish I could be one of those people, but after several years and attempts I think I’m not and this makes me unreasonably sad. HARRUMPH.
I have wrapped gifts in fabric before – works very nicely and keeps well year over year. Even *looks* far more plush than plain old paper.
I love all of this though. A simple Christmas is the very best kind, to me. Merry Christmas to everyone out there in Ohio!
Yes yes yes!!
I totally and completely agree.
Which is why I totally stopped doing that once Gabe arrived last year. The amount of time and effort wasn’t worth it (that last paragraph was totally talking to myself…haha.)
And I felt like they weren’t as excited about them as I wanted them to be! (Which is a failure on my part…expectations!)
Great post Ashley. For the past 3 or 4 years I have been doing mostly handmade/put together stuff. It’s so rewarding and even though some of the stuff is simple my friends and family look forward to my gifts.
I love your approach, Ashley. To be honest, I am all over Christmas… the decorations, the trees, thoughtful gifts… but the most important part is being with the people you love.
When I got stuck in London last year on my way to Germany before the holidays and almost didn’t make it home, it taught me a very valuable lesson: it’s really just all about BEING and spending quality time with people that I don’t get to see for most of the year. Gifts, food, decorations… it all didn’t matter THAT much in the end.
Hi Ashley,
I feel so much the same as you on many of these points. I love Christmas cookies. I love the smell of gingerbread men or house and how wonderful they look decorated all up. Most people seem to like them too but don’t like the time involved in making them. Last year I make one really great gingerbread man to go along with each grandchild’s actual Christmas gift. I put them in plastic wrap and incorporated them into the ribbon topping on the gift. We exchange names in our family (quite large) and we have a cap of $40 to spend on the person’s name that your draw. It makes so much more sense and everyone gets a nice present. Then we still have our cookies!! I think it helps us bring back the Christmas spirit. Thanks for letting me share.
oh what great ideas. i love baking and i think i might have to make that a part of my gift giving this year. we’ll see how that goes. also love the newspaper wrapping paper, so cute and easy with ribbons.
I love your wrapping-paper idea! My mom decided that everyone’s present (a packet of cookies) would be wrapped in a brown paper-bag this year. It’s awesome and personal and really not so wasteful! I bought jam and cookie jars (the cookie jars have blackboard paint on them, so you can write personalised messages directly onto the jar) and made each family 2 different types of jams. The fruit from the jam I got from friends (it only cost me a total of $10 in the end for the sugar and jars). And I will be baking some Swiss spiced cookies for the cookie jars this coming week (budgeting about $12 for that). And this is for my family of 18 people!