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While discussing family gift-giving for the holidays, my husband and I discussed our changing lives and the changing lives of our families. Things like: Now that our brothers are over 21, do we still get them presents? And how do we tell them we don’t want them to use their limited funds to get us anything? And can we not get them presents while still buying my younger siblings presents? And what about when our siblings have kids too? We can’t afford to buy 10 kids quality presents as well as all of our other people! Plus, I don’t want our kid coming home with a truckload of gifts.We discussed how we dreaded buying things for our parents: they, like us now, are financially comfortable enough to buy the things they want or need and anything we buy or make them ends up being clutter. We contemplated asking them exactly what they wanted and buying/making that, but buying a gift we were told to buy feels silly and more like a strange business transaction than a thoughtful gift. We also seriously contemplated gifting them “experiences,” but all the options we thought of were outside of our budget.
So my question is this: How have other Homies dealt with gift giving as their families and finances have changed? Have any of you been brave enough to get rid of gift giving completely and how the heck did you broach the subject with your families? -Angelle
Ah, the joys of being an adult during the holidays. My favorite solution to this: Yankee Swap or white elephant gift exchange. Of course it only works if everyone is together for the holidays. Everyone only needs to buy one gift, but everyone leaves with something new/fun/stupid/useful/silly, and I’ve always had fun doing this.
But that’s just me, what about you guys? How have you adulted gift-giving as your family has grown?
One side of my fiance’s (very large) family does something that I thought was brilliant. Every year, they throw a Christmas party, where in addition to a grab bag/gift swap type thing (with a price limit of like $10, and participation is optional), they hang up stockings, and everyone gets stocking stuffers for everyone else’s stockings. It’s little things like candies, lottery scratch cards, chapsticks, and the like, and people put in what they can afford. That way, everyone gets a bunch of small treats and trinkets to take home. We got everyone hand sanitizers from Bath and Body Works ($1 each at the outlet), and everyone loved them because they were practical. One year, someone put a tiny decorated mirror in my stocking, and it lives in my makeup bag for travel, and the chocolates always get eaten.
My immediate family always buys presents from each other, generally with an unspoken price range of $25-$40. This year though, we’re all broke, so my sister and her husband I think are baking cookies for everyone, and my fiance and I plan to tie-dye gifts for people, with maybe a small personal trinket (under $10) for each person.
I love all these ideas! The consumables sound fabulous and I will push for that next year. My family has done a yankee swap for years with no issues. My inlaws are another story though…
Last year my inlaws tried the name swap thing with each couple and a $50 limit. It was great buying one gift for a couple instead of buying things for 9 separate people!!! Everyone was all in except one sister who bought stuff for everyone anyway. It made for an uncomfortable day and seemed to raise a lot of hard feelings. Instead of holding that sister to the swap rules this year, the parents caved and gave up on the swap! What do you do when your large 25 and older family of 10 doesn’t want to do a name exchange or yankee swap???? I don’t think buying Christmas gifts should be done due to guilt or pressure but that’s what it seems to have become.
I’m grateful for all the ideas shared here! I’m a stereotypically broke grad student, but I love cooking, so I try to pick something hard to buy/make and then make that a general gift (jams, mince pies, Christstollen.) A good secondhand bookstore can account for almost one-stop shopping. My similarly cash-strapped friends and I usually get together for a party where everyone brings something nice to eat/drink, instead of exchanging gifts. Charity gifts can be great too: this is a specific tradition for my grandparents, who have always modeled generosity to others.
I know at least for big families that still get together a secret santa or pollyanna concept can be fun. My husband’s side of the family is pretty big with 6 cousins, many with children, with a large range of ages. So they decided to have a really low budget, like $10-15 per gift and a theme, like one year was purple. So some people would get nice gifts, and some people would buy gag gifts, like one year there was a Backstreet Boy Photo Album. It kind of keep that gift shopping fun but saves LOTS of money.
As for buying gifts for your parents, yeah it is always hard. Some years I find it easy, other years harder. A lot of the time it usually means getting that nice thing that they want but haven’t replaced yet. Or buying something we as children know more about than they do, like computers and technologies. This year I took some photos from my Nanna and Pappy’s wedding, scanned, digitally restored, and made a photo album. Clearly I can’t do this every year, but I am sure everyone will enjoy it.
This is the best board! I feel like I have a very eclectic mix that will probably get streamlined as my age group starts to spawn.
My side: my dad’s family always does a white elephant gift exchange and it’s super fun and low stress, my siblings plus SOs draw names, and then we buy one gift for our parents. I think next year we might ask our parents to get in on the exchange, because we are all so damn poor (and if my not poor parents want to gift us more things, that’s their perogative). My mom’s family is a little weirder. We always got things as kids, and now it’s weird as adults, but we don’t have the money to get everyone something. I’ve done some DIY and baking in the past, but it’s for sure not expected. Not sure how I feel about that….I have a lot of hangups about getting stuff without giving stuff.
Husband’s side: we don’t do anything with his dad’s extended family, so that’s easy. On his mom’s side, we do a name swap with all the cousins and their SOs. We give “couple gifts”, so we got one thing for his parents, one thing for my BIL+wife, and one thing for the SIL+fiance.
I’m so glad this is being talked about everywhere this year! This year with my family we are only doing token and stocking suffers, and more just spend time together. It is such a relief since my husband and I are down to one income, and we are just managing to keep our heads above water in normal months. I was able to get his side to set a budget (25$ per person, which is seemed high to me but can’t complain) and then I DIYed everything to save money. The best thing is to start the discussion about how consumerist the whole situation is, how “it’s the thought that counts” doesn’t mean anything when it’s socially expected. I’m hoping to get the husbands side on board next year (the brothers-in-law seemed open to it, the sister-in-law did not). Good luck!
Like all families, my family is growing, I am a widow and on SS,all but one of my five great grand children live out of state.I have nine grandchildren and only 5 live close by. They go to college and work and lead busy lives. It is getting very stressful trying to figure what to do about gift giving. I would appreciate any suggestions,
We have a large family and everyone gets together for Christmas. You should see the cheer and laughter when all of my aunts, uncles and all the extended family gathers in my grandma’s place. We often agree on a spending limit and play white elephant ( http://www.elephantrules.com for those who don’t know what it is ). It’s great because my cousins and I love to prank everyone and get them to fight about what they think is the best gift only to be bitterly disappointed 🙂
In my dad’s family it’s pretty much always been nobody under 18 gets a gift from anyone outside immediate family. It’s a pretty big family so that’s not surprising. My mom’s always used to have more gift giving though since there’s so few in my generation. Shortly after I graduated college though, which coincided with both the economic downturn and my mom & aunt’s retiring, we started just doing a name-draw sort of thing. Everyone gets at least one gift, from the person who drew your name. I still get something from my parents (and give to them regardless of who I pull as well) and often my aunts will give a small gift of a chocolate bar or something else inexpensive to me outside of the name-draw too, but it removes the expectation of anyone spending substantial amounts of money on more than one person.
Also, for me personally, the older I get the less *stuff* I want so my list is much shorter. I used to ask for all sorts of movies and video games. This year I had one item on my list: a pair or two of smartwool socks, simply because all the pairs I have from 10 or so years ago are finally wearing out. Amazing how your priorities change as you grow older.