Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Ready, Set.......Shop?

Can you believe Christmas Eve is 4 weeks from today!!?? Unbelievable. This year has just flown by. Black Friday is (of course) this Friday. Do you go? I try to avoid crowds as much as possible so I will not be heading out at 4 am in hopes of a great deal. 2 years in a row I did do the mad dash and I will have to admit, there is a certain excitement of being at a store that early trying to get the hot item. That was about 6 years, 3 kids ago. You know what I have found.....except for a few spectacular deals, you can get some great deals throughout the whole season.

So for the last 5 years we have used a new system for Christmas shopping and it works great for us. First we make a list of all the people we will be buying for. We have cut our list way down. It consists of our children, 2 nieces and 2 nephews, parents, and angel tree gift. That's about it. I may get a gift card for the mailman.

Next we brainstorm some ideas for each of them. Each of our children get 5 gifts, 3 from us and 2 from Santa. We look over the budget and we are ready to go. Since Chris' days off fall in the middle of the week it works out great. We pick 1 day (usually a Wednesday) and book my mother WAY in advance to sleepover the night before. On this 1 day we do ALL our shopping minus shopping for each other. We start off the day going out for breakfast just the two of us. We make the game plan of what stores and in what order. Then we shop, and shop and shop. We will stop for lunch.

This works out great for us. For one thing it is all done. Than it is the added bonus that we got to spend the day together just the 2 of us.

This works for us. What do you do for Christmas shopping?

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