I found this series over at Simple Mom’s Blog and since I wasn’t reading her blog last year its all brand new (and VERY fascinating!) to me!  Maybe its new to you too!  Since the cooler weather has finally hit Kentucky and the leaves are starting to change I am ALREADY feeling the pressure of the holiday season closing in!  I am excited but at the same time, there are SO many things to do, so many crafts to create, so many COOKIES to bake!  I always want to DO IT ALL and find myself in a miserable state of failure when its the week before Christmas, there are 10 unfinished projects and the cards are not even mailed yet!

So… I am SO excited to see this series come along.  Hopefully by starting NOW I will get to enjoy my holiday season and get EVERYTHING done!

It IS just 12 weeks until Christmas!  Sounds like a lot of time… but not really!

Week 12: Soldify the Christmas Budget

For us… the budget is rather small this year.  We are going to focus more on “doing and being” than “buying and spending”.  Our kids are young enough that they will be happy with anything as long as its something they can do with us!  We have a few places that we KNOW we will be spending.

1) Our one big purchase this year will be a gaming system.  We have been back and forth between a Wii and PS3.  One thing that we really like about PS3 is that it will play DVD’s also.  I am ALL about some multi-tasking.  The plus of Wii is that it is just SO darn fun!  But the console is not really the EXPENSIVE part even though they HAVE dropped the price on Amazon… we won’t be buying from there anyhow.  We are hoping to purchase from Toys R Us as we have been saving a large gift card that someone sent us earlier in the year along with some other monies (a bit of the profits from yard sales etc…).  We have enough saved to buy one but not both. We also like the idea of buying one nice item to keep so that the families can just buy “add ons” to it as gifts.  That is better than getting tons of little stuff that none of the kids will care about in a month from now.

ANY opinions on the two systems?  Please feel free to leave it in the comments!!

2) Another thing that is really important to us are really fabulous Christmas cards! We have so many friends all over the world and we LOVE sending (and receiving) cards.  Its always a challenge for me to get the outfits, the pictures, the design, printing etc together but that is a huge goal this year… to have our cards MAILED the weekend of Thanksgiving!  YAY!!!!!!!!!

3) The kid’s gifts to EACH OTHER. We have made this into a tradition and plan to keep it.  Each year we take our kids, individually, out shopping.  They are to pick out ONE present for each of the siblings.  We give them a pretty good size budget for this because we WANT them to know what it feels like to GIVE.  It always brings tears to my eyes to hear them telling each other, with such excitement, to “open MINE first”…

4) Holiday Baking. I will have to include this in our budget because I am a HUGE baker.  I LOVE me some Christmas goodies!  I probably spend a good 1-2 week food budget on this!  (for us that is $100-150)  That is something I really REALLY like to do.  I love to don my apron and get flour in my hair, have my entire kitchen in shambles and produce YUMMY goodies!

5) Troy and My gifts to each other. This WILL have a place in our budget this year.  Too many years have gone by that we allocated money to everywhere but each other.  I have already started thinking of what to get Troy but nothing struck me as brilliant like last year’s DUNDER MIFFLIN and Nooma DVD’s!

Be sure to hop on over to Simple Mom’s blog and read her tips for creating a budget!!!  Simple mom even has a cool Christmas Budget WORKSHEET Pdf… she rocks!  Go check it out to see ALL of her tips!

Popularity: 6% [?]