Quick Hit Guide to a Budget Holiday Experience

We all enjoy the holidays. It’s a great time to get together with family and friends you don’t see very often. You get to enjoy good food together, watch holiday movies, catch-up, go snowboarding/skiing and best of all, take a necessary break from your hectic work or school life. I remember as a child, I lived for the breaks. The mere idea that a break was coming got me through most of my school life. This comes with a price-tag, though, cause holidays can be a very expensive experience. Gifts, even small ones, will add up quickly. Snowboard trips including gear, clothes, lift tickets, accommodations and food will leave a pretty sizable dent in your savings. There was one Christmas that my brother and I took to the local mall to get gifts for our close friends. We swept through the mall, quickly found gifts we figured to be perfect for our friends, then busted out our credit cards and swiped-swiped-swiped. By the next pay cycle, we realized what a hole we dug ourselves in; unfortunately, it would be years before we would shed our spendthrift ways. Here are some good ways to enjoy your holidays and still stay afloat financially:

1. Prioritize your gift giving. There’s a famous twitter user that made this relevant tweet last week: “Everybody’s broke, so here’s the rule for Christmas this year; if you still &$#@ your pants, you get a present. Otherwise, tough &$#@.” Crude as that sounds, I found wisdom in it. A lot of us aren’t at a place to be dishing out gifts left and right even though that might feel good. Consider who makes the cut. Significant others, parents and children make it. Everyone else needs to get in line. Making your bills and paying your mortgage takes precedence over you being a pseudo-Santa Claus. I’m sure everyone else will understand because they’re probably in the same boat.

2. Embrace Secret Santa. If you must give gifts to your friends, then embrace the Secret Santa. Secret Santa works like this. You get together your group of friends (office buddies, bowling buddies, church group, fraternity etc.), write down everyone’s name on a slip of paper and everyone pulls a name one by one. You become the Secret Santa for that one person. You just have to get one decent gift for that one person. If you don’t know that person that well, you can use this as an opportunity to investigate them. Learn their likes and dislikes. Send spies to find out what they might want. At the Christmas party, everyone opens up their gifts and tries to guess who their Secret Santa was. It’s a fun way to spice up the Christmas gift giving experience and the best part about it is that you only have to buy ONE gift. Yes, it may feel a bit impersonal, but in these tough economic times, you’ve gotta do what you gotta do. See it this way; you’re giving one gift but you’re helping everyone else out by giving them (and yourself) the gift of financial responsibility! Try Elfster, an online gift exchange service; it’s great, especially the part where you get to ask anonymous questions!

3. Be creative. If you’re artsy, make gifts for your friends and save yourself a bundle of cash. If you plan on going snowboarding, forgo that cushy cabin experience and max out the square feet of a cheap motel with your friends. Bring instant noodles to slurp down between runs. Powdered hot cocoa and canned soup are a much cheaper alternative to the prices for cocoa and soup you’ll get in an isolated ski lodge. If you’re looking to just get a winter snow experience (quite a trek for us Californians), then jump in a car for a day trip with your friends. Grab a sled, hike up the mountain and you’ll be having yourself a ball in no time. The point is that there’s always a different means to an end. Learn to enjoy the holidays for the experiences you’ll get from the quality time you get to spend with close friends and family, not for the gifts that you may or may not be able to give one another this year!