Feeling frazzled and stressed over a long to-do list for December? I’m over on MomLifeToday talking about three ways to simplify the holiday season.
Here’s a snippet of my post:
December can be a busy, frantic season full of last-minute shopping, parties, baking, gift-wrapping, recitals, and get-togethers. While these things can all be memorable and special, it’s important that we not lose sight of what’s most important at Christmastime: celebrating the birth of our Savior and savoring the moments and memories.
Here are three ways to help you streamline your life and responsibilities so you can enjoy Christmas more this year:
1. Pare down your gift-giving.
Evaluate your gift list: Do you really need to give a gift to your uncle’s neighbor’s dog? I’m pretty sure Fido will survive just fine without another fancy chew toy, so save your money and use it to buy gifts for those you really care about or want to bless.
Creating limits for how many gifts you buy helps to simplify things. I know some families who give their children three gifts in three different categories (such as: something to wear, something to read, and something fun)…
I’ve given a lot of thought to gifts on my limited budget this year, and I’m trying to approach of combining handmade gifts with some wise purchases (things I know that my family actually needs or wants). For example, I purged my craft closet and found several skeins of really nice yarn and some cute buttons. Those can be used to knit infinity scarves for my mother and grandmother, and I already had the supplies (probably spent a fortune on that yarn back in my non-thrifty days).
I like my gifts to be personal, but I didn’t want to come off as taking the cheap route. I’m sure many people have lots of “ingredients” lying around to make some pretty special and heartfelt gifts 🙂 I’ll save money, have fun making gifts, and get to surprise my family members with something they’ll like!
We’re expecting our third child, due between the holidays with a strong possibility of induction or c-section just before Christmas.
Each year, my inlaws give us a HUGE guilt trip about attending all of their extended family’s events, which are several hundred miles away from where we live. It always entails a $$$ hotel stay, $$$ gasoline, $$$ food plus $$$ presents are expected. Two years ago we attended, and my husband’s aunt actually scolded us for not bringing a gift of cash for her 17-year-old son. The two parents are investment bankers and their child is not lacking for anything. But to flat out say that they expected us to give him a cash gift was ludicrous. My inlaws also expect us to be at their house every year for Christmas Eve.
Even after 10 years that my husband and I have been married, they can’t get over the fact that we are our own family unit, with our own desire to have traditions unique to us and our children. And they forget that I have family that I’d like to see, too. One year, my father in law sent my husband a very nasty email about how disappointed he was that my husband doesn’t bring our family to attend all of these functions every year.
So, since this baby is due during the last week of December, we put our feet down as soon as we told them that we were expecting. For once, they are buying it as a “legitimate excuse”, in their own words.
I don’t feel like I need an “excuse” to have a pleasant holiday season. All my inlaws do is load us up with stress, and because of it, my husband has come to hate the whole holiday season. And who can blame him, with the way his parents behave?!
In future years, with our child having a holiday season birthday, I’m hoping that my inlaws will realize that they are not the only people on this Earth and to let us celebrate Christ’s birth and the birthday of our child in our own way that we can enjoy as a family together.
I know exactly how you are feeling, my in laws to always put the guilt trip on us, to travel 12 hours to watch TV with them. There is never anything planned, and most of the time when we get there, nobody even fixed a sandwich for us.
This year due to Pregnancy issues we are getting to stay home, and i can honestly say i love this holiday season.
Ouch!
I didn’t realize my husband and I had it so easy in our own strange circumstances. Three years after our marriage (of 21 years!), his widowed father married my divorced mother. (My father having died years before.) Even though they lived 3 hours away, there was only ONE place we were expected to go for the holidays so we avoided all the my family/your family holiday heartache. My father-in-law died several years ago and my mother has since moved back to town so there still is just one place to go.
Your chuckle for the day: This sort of “keeping it in the family” is rather a tradition in my husbands family and I have teased him endlessly about family “speed-dating” reunions and being an inbred redneck. Well, when I started tracing his family on Ancestry.com — I found he really was. LOL. in the 1860’s there was a first cousin marriage in Kentucky. You know I had fun with that. 😉
That is TOO funny!