Today we’ll be focusing on your lists of people that you will be giving gifts to or sending a Christmas card. These lists might take a little while, but remember, you can always come back later this week or next if you forget to add someone, so don’t worry about being perfect. Get your thoughts down and out of your head, onto paper, so you don’t have to stress about forgetting someone or something.
If your children are buying gifts for people and you would like to help them develop their lists, you can do so, but they don’t need to be involved if they aren’t.
We’re going to start with the Holiday Gifts list – a list of everyone that you’re going to be giving a present to this year. For some of you, that may be just your immediate family. For others, that list may include everyone from your child’s teacher to your mail carrier to your dog’s groomer. Whoever your list includes, write down everyone on one side of a sheet of paper (or use the template that we’ve provided).
Whoever you decide to give gifts to, remember to invest your holiday time and money wisely. Would your mailman love a thoughtful gift? Probably. But he’s not going to hate you if you don’t give him anything, and if removing him from the list brings some extra time or money into your holiday budget, it’s okay to remove some of the people to bring a little extra wiggle room into your holidays.
If there are quite a few people like that on your list, think about an easy batch type of gift. Can you bake a big batch of cookies for everyone that you think you should give a gift to but you’re not really sure what to do? Can you give them all a Christmas card with a five dollar bill in it and a nice note?
Once you have your list of everyone you’re giving a gift to, you can start filling in the remaining columns – the gift you’ll be giving them, where you’re getting that gift, and how much your budget is for that gift. You don’t have to use all of these columns, but some people find them useful for planning and budgeting purposes. (We created this template in a spreadsheet instead of a document because we’ve found that it can make sorting things easier later on, but feel free to create your own word document or just jot it down on a piece of paper.) You’ll notice there’s one more column on the right – you can use that column later to jot down exactly what you spent, if you’d like.
We just want to take a second here to point something out. For most people, they don’t care how much money you spend on them, so your gifts don’t have to be extravagant. There are hundreds of ways you can show someone that you love them with an inexpensive gift. Put the money towards memories, like a zoo membership, or make a coupon booklet that entitles the owner to a free back massage, an ice cream date, and other small things. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make your loved ones feel how much you love them. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, comment in our Facebook group and we’ll see if we can help figure out some ideas!
If you haven’t come up with the perfect gift for the most important people, you’ve still got some time, so feel free to skip over them and come back to it. This isn’t meant to cause stress. Just start filling in the blanks, and do what you can.
This is going to be one of your more time-intensive lists of this week, but don’t worry about forgetting anyone. There’s still a week and a half before the week for buying gifts, so you’ll have plenty of time to add or change things. (And if that’s not enough time, there’s still almost three months until Christmas, so you don’t need to worry that you’ll run out of time before then.)
The last list we’re going to work on today is a list of all of your Christmas Card recipients, including their address and/or email address, depending on if you’re going to do a Christmas card through the mail or an email.
If you’re having trouble remembering everyone that you’d like to send this to, scroll through your contacts on your phone, in your email list, or even your Facebook friends. You should be able to find most of these people pretty quickly.
Remember that you don’t need to send a Christmas card if it doesn’t bring you joy or make you happy. With social media, most of the need for a Christmas card has been eradicated, and while it can still be nice to catch up with everyone, it is not necessary and it if causes you stress, then we’re giving you permission to let it go. Go without it for a year, and if you miss it, then you can do it again next year.
That’s it for the day! We’ll see you tomorrow!
PJ and Brett