Getting a Jump Start on Christmas

Whoa! Did I just say Christmas??? Why, yes I did! That's right - the Ngs have Christmas on the brain, despite the fact that St. Patrick's Day revelers are currently making all sorts of noise outside of my office window.

You may remember that, at the end of last year, I raved about Simple Mom's 12 Weeks to a Peaceful Christmas series. It breaks down the time-consuming tasks that often occupy our holiday season, and urges you to complete one task per week for 12 weeks. The series was a life saver, and my normally high holiday-related stress level was the lowest I can remember since I got married and actually became responsible for planning and organizing the holiday for my own family.

Week One's task is to create your holiday budget. The thought behind this first and very important task is that if you plan out how much you're going to spend on the holidays, you can set aside the money over weeks and months, rather than piling up credit card debt in December and January. Obviously, the longer you give yourself to save, the easier it will be. While I didn't get around to our Christmas budget as early as I had hoped (in January), I finally put the finishing touches on it last week. As always, I assume slightly higher costs than we'll actually incur - I'd rather come in under budget than go over. This year, the total cost of our holiday expenses will be about $1,000. (Holy cow! That sounds like a lot when it's just written there like that...) This figure includes everything holiday-related:

• Gifts for immediate family and nieces/nephews, as well as gifts for our church's Christmas Giving Tree
• Professional photography (we like having a professional family photo taken once a year, so we have it taken around the holidays and use it for our photo cards) and prints for immediate family, photo holiday cards, and postage, as well as holiday stationary for the following year's Christmas letter (I get this on after-Christmas sale, so I paid less than $5 for 100 pages of stationary for our 2010 Christmas letter!)
  
• Ingredients for holiday baking and our Christmas/New Year's meal (Carey's family comes to our house for Christmas/New Year's, so we budget for a meal to feed 14 adults and 5 children)
• Charitable donations
• Plus, I budget a small amount ($25) for myself to spend on anything I might find on after-Christmas super sale. I bought a cute snowman candle holder and a beautiful Nativity set for 75% off after Christmas 2009. So, while I don't go crazy, I do like to treat myself to a little something. :-)

As I said, I've over-budgeted most of these items, so I fully expect our Christmas expenses to come in under $1,000. But, having the budget set up now and setting aside money for this specific purpose, we'll have to save $100 per month. Now that sounds much more doable than $1,000 right around the holidays, right? I mean, that's $25 per week. Carey and I are lucky to get paid on alternating weeks, so we've set up a sub-account within our ING savings account, and we're automatically having $25 deposited into that account every week from now until Christmas. That is completely reasonable, and I have no doubt that, with smart spending in the other areas of our budget, Carey and I will barely miss that $25 per week. (But we'll be thankful for the money when the holiday bills start rolling in!)

Another part of our holiday budgeting is buying presents when we can get the best prices. In some cases, this can be hard. With kids, their interests can change very quickly, so something that we find on sale in March may be outdated by December. Thankfully, Abby is still at the age where, while she does know certain characters (like Elmo and Dora), she'll still pretty much play with anything. Carey and I took the opportunity to purchase toys at Target at 75% off after Christmas last year. We found some great block sets and musical toys, as well as some cute pajamas (in what we assume will be Abby's size next winter). As I mentioned last year, Abigail gets three Christmas presents from mommy and daddy because baby Jesus received three presents from the wise men. Abby will be receiving one of the block sets (ages 2 - 5), a musical keyboard with microphone (ages 18+ months) and three pairs of pajamas (they came as one set, so we decided to count them as one gift) in size 2T. Total cost of Abigail's presents: approximately $19, including tax. (Regular price would have been over $75! I'm telling you - the after-Christmas sales at Target were GREAT!) Plus, we managed to snag another set of blocks that Abby will receive for her birthday.

Knowing that we like to participate in our church's Christmas Giving Tree every year, we also decided to purchase some additional toys for that program during last year's after-Christmas sale. The tree contains gift tags with the gender and age of a child, so we can pick tags that are appropriate for the toys that we purchased. So, we bought two gifts for the Giving Tree, in addition to everything we'd purchased for Abby.

What's left for a girl to do? Wrap those presents, of course! Last weekend, I sat downstairs and wrapped and labeled the gifts that we have. They are now tucked away in one of the downstairs closets, just waiting to be opened by smiling little kids on Christmas day. :-)

Am I crazy for thinking about Christmas already? Probably. Do I care? Not really. Not only do I love Christmas and the entire holiday season, I love finding a great deal and knowing that I've saved our family money. And honestly, when Abigail opens her new set of blocks, is she going to care that we paid $6.50, rather than $25.99? I don't think so...