Are You Ready For Christmas?
26. Jun, 2009 
2 Comments
Did you know that there is less than 6 months until Christmas? Are you ready for the snow, the presents, and the credit card debt? No, probably not, seeing as its June. However, now is the perfect time to start getting ready for Christmas! Start planning for Christmas now to reduce stress, financially and otherwise, come late Novemember.
Develop a Plan of Attack
How many times have you been running around a mall in late December desperately trying to find the perfect gift? There isn’t enough time, and there are too many options, and none of them are good enough. If you’re dissapointed with the gift, then they will be too, and then Christmas will be ruined!
Avoid that disaster, yet again, by planning ahead. Make a list of all the people that you’re planning on giving a gift to come Christmas time. By their name, spend a minute or two brainstorming some potential gifts for them. Don’t worry, you don’t have to decide what to get them just yet – the point is that you want to get a head start.
Now, over the next month or two, pay attention to the things that they are looking to get. Do they want a new sweater, or a new barbeque? Is there a box set of DVDs they wish they could splurge on? Add these items to your list. This list is your plan of attack. For each person, you should have 5-10 options for gifts that you can get them, things that you know that they will appreciate. I suggest you more specifically look for “timeless” gifts, not fleets of fancy.
Start Bargain Hunting
Because you have 4-6 months before Christmas, you have plenty of time to find a good deal. Don’t go crazy spending tons of times searching for the best price on each individual item, just keep your eye open. Sales tend to be circular, so they’ll come around once or twice before the Christmas season hits. If anything on your list goes on sale, buy it! You have their present! Hide it in your house, and write down on your list what you bought and where it is hidden.
If you want to keep up on deals, consider building yourself a deal finding homepage, ala The Simple Dollar.
If you’ve been automating your annual expenses, you might even have a fund that’s being constantly supplied with Christmas gift money.
Seal the Deal
Come Christmas time, you’ll hopefully have a treasure chest full of Christmas presents ready to be given away. I suggest that you purchase two gifts, a big one sometime throughout the year, and a smaller “stocking stuffer” that reflects their more current wants/desires. For example, get them a subscription to Consumer Reports like they’ve been wanting for a couple of years, and their newest favorite DVD.
Even if you don’t manage to get every present on your list by Mid-July, you’ll at least be able to start the process well in advance so that you’re not caught unprepared. You might even get a few gifts ahead of time for a remarkable deal!
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Matt Goulart
Christmas for my family is simple; we generally trade around books or music we’ve already enjoyed, and everybody makes some special food. End of story. Christmas for my partner’s family is a huge deal, traveling and scheduling and coordinating Christmas lists (yes, they send us lists – and if we wait too long someone else buys the gifts we were going to get and emails and said I got it! and then we have to figure out something else. I did it for a few years, and then I threw up my hadns and bowed out two years in a row – one year we were at Walmart in a strange city in the middle of the night, the next year I was home alone with the baby every night the week before we traveled (packing, cleaning, baking, and wrapping) while my partner went out shopping. This year, I wrote the lists of gifts down, grouped them by where they would be found, and just made him take the list wtih him when he went places. Everything was purchased a few weeks ahead, and it was way less stressful. All the times I just said to him "Print out the list so you have it!" didn’t help at all – doing the basic organizational work for him (but not the shopping, choosing, paying, or wrapping work) made my life way easier.
I’m hoping to do a little bit more pre-work this year to be able to give more homemade gifts – we have our absolutely worst fights, every year, over the high Christmas expectations, and I’m not doing that again.
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I definitely shop throughout the year as I see things — especially important as my husband’s family is in Canada and we’re in the U.S. so we have to ship early. For the nieces and nephews, I only get books because they have so many toys already. I take a lot of pleasure in picking out books for them — the trick is not to stash away what I’ve bought so well that I forget where it is!
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