Gifts and Giving

For many families, Christmas comes not once a year, but lingers on for months! Credit card bills arrive shortly after season’s end, not to be paid off until the following summer. Grocery budgets groan under the burden of holiday meals and baking supplies. Nearly two-thirds of American families don't know the true cost of their own Christmas celebration--and if they did, they'd be shocked. That much ... for a single day?

Fight the seasonal spending spree with the financial tool of choice: a Christmas budget.

Every family has one: a gift-giver of extraordinary flair and creativity. Year after year, this paragon finds just the right gift, large or small, for every friend and relation, and all without breaking the bank.

Her “just because” offerings are tiny jewels, she’s hip to the latest teen trends—and she never, ever hears the double-barbed response, “Oh, you shouldn't have--you really shouldn’t have!”

What’s her secret? A master gift list.

Gift-giving. Seldom do we engage in an activity that invokes so many conflicting values.

On the one hand, we hope our gift will entertain, educate, and amuse. We dream of seeing our special gift proudly displayed in the home of the recipient. We hunt and search and shop, trying to find just the right gift to stand for the relationship we're celebrating.

On the other hand, gift-buying brings us up against our limitations. While our emotions urge extravagance, our wallets counsel frugality. The desire to delight a child with the year's hot toy runs smack up against the knowledge that the toy is question is shoddy, lacking in play value, and composed of 374 tiny plastic parts (most of which will become food for the vacuum cleaner by January 15^th).

They’re seldom acknowledged and rarely discussed: the unwritten rules of gift giving. Even if we don’t talk about them, “the rules” determine what we give, how much we give, and to whom we give. They govern everything from the office Secret Santa exchange, to classroom gifts, to a family morning under the Christmas tree.

Problem is, “unwritten” means that gift-giving rules are subject to interpretation—both in our own minds, and in our dealings with others.

First, if you don’t understand why you gift as you do, it’s easy to enter the land of the absurd: making a midnight raid on the supermarket’s toy aisle when you discover that one child’s stocking holds fewer gifts than his brother’s. Unexamined gift-giving assumptions lead to gifting decisions that can violate your own values—and worse, those decisions can appear to operate from nowhere!

Second, following one version of the unwritten rules can lead to conflict with others, who may hold a different view.

Scratch the surface of gift-giving stress, and you’re likely to find a rules conflict. Young adults take on debt to give their own parents gifts the empty nesters neither need nor use. A determined crafter feels let down when a handmade gift—the product of hours of work --is unwrapped to a lukewarm response from the recipient. None of the parties can address the real conflict unless they understand the source: a failure to share the same assumptions about the act of giving.

Bringing “the rules” into focus is the first step to bringing sanity and simplicity back to the season—and being clear about their underlying assumptions can ease conflicts with others.

How do you and your family interpret the following rules? There are no right or wrong answers.

Holiday spending can be hard on the pocketbook--and bought on credit, "Christmas Day" can stretch into the new year for weeks or months.

Ease the Christmas cash crunch with creative ways to save money for Christmas! Financial institutions offer dedicated Christmas clubs for the disciplined, but savvy holiday planners have found other ways to accumulate cash for holiday spending.

Repeat after me: "This year, I won't be wrapping gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve!"

If there's a single most-underestimated holiday chore, it's gift wrapping. Supplies lie scattered throughout the house, while space and privacy are hard to come by. Translation: late-night Christmas Eve wrapping sessions.

Not this year! We're going to lick the wrapping problem at the outset, by setting up a wrap and mail activity center. With workspace, tools and supplies at hand, it’s easy to wrap as you go—and enjoy the task, without grump, grumble or hurry.

Planning for Christmas, catalog shopping has many advantages over the holiday mall scene. No long lines. No sore feet. No staggering to the car, weighed down by parcels and shopping bags. Shopping becomes a pleasure, conducted from a favorite chair. Phone in your selections, sit back, and wait for the UPS man. Ahhhhh

Scanning a list of handmade craft gifts is something like reading a cookbook: it makes you hungry! Whether you wander the crafts store, settle in at the library's craft bookshelf, or flip through holiday magazines, visions of bright and beautiful gifts follow one after the other.

Give in to that impulse, and you're likely to find yourself drowning in UFOs: Un-Finished Objects.

How to cut through the creative chaos and stay anchored so you'll finish the job? Try these tips to organize--and finish!--crafted gifts.

If the local newscast (egged on by local retail merchants) tells me one more time exactly how many "shopping days" are left until Christmas, I'll scream! For busy home managers, there are never enough days to shop for/buy/craft/bake gifts for family and friends.

Over the years, your CEO has given this matter much thought. What follows is her list of ways you can cheat--save money, time, aggravation, or energy--that old Christmas shopping demon. Bear in mind that this concept is an intensely personal one, not necessarily a universal precept. So if you're the type to lavish time and money and thought and fancy gift wrap on every single gift . . . hey, wait a minute! If that's you, what are you doing here?

Gift. Say the word and many levels of meaning go through our minds! When preparing for the Christmas holidays, "gift" is a loaded term, one that provokes equal parts of anxiety and joy.

In our consumer society, the idea of "gift" is no longer simple, no longer free. As individuals, as families, we must try to preserve simpler values against an economy, a retail institution, and an enormous idea machine, all devoted to a single goal: to persuade us to spend money on holiday gifts. The forces of consumption have taken the pure and simple concept of "gift" and layered that concept with staggering traps.As we make out holiday gift lists, we contemplate gifts and giving. One by one, we'll review the names of those we love. We'll call them to mind, think of them, draw close to them as we plan. A loving exercise. A simple exercise. A happy exercise.