Christmas shopping Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

A Zero-Budget Christmas: A Little Perspective

Zero-Budget Christmas

A Zero-Budget Christmas

2: A little Christmas perspective

Mothers are amazing. Most healthy mothers, no matter their financial status, will do whatever it takes to meet their kids’ needs. They take extra jobs, learn how to stretch a budget, and give up their own personal comfort for the benefit of their children.

What is even more amazing is that most mothers really don’t mind doing any of this because it’s for their kids.

But at Christmas, the disparity between the families who have plenty and the ones who are just scraping by seems a little wider. Mothers who otherwise “make it work” and carry a sense of pride in how they manage to care for their children, suddenly feel the sharpness of lack.

As someone who has been there, allow me say this: there is a massive difference in knowing you are not rich and feeling poor. No one likes to feel poor.

Maybe you know that feeling too, and you are looking for a better way to make it through the season. Fortunately, this series is here to help. I’ve learned lots of tips and tricks over the years as my husband and I have raised five kids on a shoestring. The great news is, you can make Christmas magical on a zero-budget.

I introduced this series by telling you our Christmas story.

Now, before we do anything else, we’re going to put Christmas in perspective. Stick with me here–I am not trying to get out of giving you actual, practical advice on how to make Christmas work when money is limited. That’s coming.

But I would be negligent in my care of you if I did not start with some important fundamentals. I can tell you how to do more with less money, but nothing will change for you unless you understand your motivation for giving and learn how to protect your heart from manipulation.

If you do not get this, you will spend the rest of your Christmases running the same frantic race, no matter what your budget, because you will believe that if you don’t do it right, you will have failed.

That is not the better way.

toy truck with Christmas tree

Still, it’s the path many of us end up taking because we love our kids, and our heart’s desire is to make sure they feel that love every day. Usually, that means smiles and hugs and making pancakes once in a while, but at Christmas, the cultural expectation in our time in history is that we show love through lavish gift-giving.

This has not always been the case, of course. If you’ve ever read through Little House in the Big Woods, you might remember what Mary and Laura and the cousins received on Christmas morning: a peppermint stick and new, red mittens. Laura alone got a new, handmade doll that Ma made from fabric scraps, but Mary didn’t because she already had one.

Times have changed! Now, even our expectations have expectations: try giving any kid the same gifts Mary and Laura got and you’ll see what I mean. What has changed is marketing. We have it. They didn’t. Every single product sold in every single store is run through a fine-tuned system developed to capitalize on our human emotions of greed, pride, and guilt.

And it works. According to research, the average American plans to spend nearly $1000 on gifts in 2016! Parents are anticipating spending an average of $422 per child.

If you are on a limited or nearly zero-budget, those expectations sink you. You can feel like a failure because you cannot meet those expectations without endangering your family’s finances.

Budget Christmas

But you have to realize this: shame is one of the emotions the marketing industry loves best because it motivates you to spend more than you should to make it go away. That is manipulation, plain and simple, and once you call it out, it makes it easier to fight back.

We have to be smarter than the industry and secure enough in our financial choices to make decisions in December that won’t haunt us in January. We need to choose the better things, and I don’t mean higher-quality products.

One of the best ways to do that is to stay conscious of the higher goal. It’s easy to fall victim to the social pressure to give our kids a great Christmas (whatever we think that means) because it echoes our natural inclination. We delight in giving good gifts to our children. That is a fragment of God in us.

The trouble is, we take it to extremes. If we’re not careful, our desire to give our children good gifts can prevent them from receiving an even better gift: contentment.

We have to remind ourselves that our goal as parents should never be to give our kids everything they want, but rather, to help our kids be content with whatever they have.

We say we believe that, but when we begin to fear our children’s disappointment, find ourselves getting a sense of pride or identity in the gifts we give, become consumed with finding the “right” gift or giving “enough” presents, chances are, we’re pursuing happiness rather than fostering contentment in ourselves and in our children.

Don’t get me wrong-happiness is nice. I will not argue with that. But it’s like a cubic zirconium: lots of sparkle with little lasting value.

Contentment is the diamond.

Having a right Christmas perspective means seeking contentment over happiness

Remember that when you’re standing in the toy aisle or adding items to your Amazon cart. You can completely blow your budget to give your kids happiness, but it will not last. Or, you can choose to stay within the budget that best fits the long-term goals of your family and work on fostering contentment instead.

One will begin to pay dividends in January. The other will leave you with a deficit. Either way, you choose.

Make the better choice, and no matter what your budget is, you will always have the best gift.

Next time, we’ll talk about ways to grow a zero-budget into some workable Christmas capital. If you’ve been wishing you had just a little more money to work with, you won’t want to miss it! You’ll be surprised at easy it is to do the very things you’re already doing but make money doing it!

*To begin A Zero-Budget Christmas series at the beginning, click here.

**During this series, affiliate links may be included for your convenience. Thank you for supporting this ministry!

A Zero-Budget Christmas

1: Making Christmas magical with little money

Our first Christmas was spent in a one-bedroom apartment in married student housing. We took a bit of the money Jeff earned from shoveling the sidewalks for the First Congregational Church of Hamilton and headed to the local Target to buy a $39 plastic Christmas tree.

We decorated it with a box of ornaments Jeff’s mother had saved for him through the years, and the ones I had collected because of my love for Christmas. But the only presents under the tree were the ones relatives sent and the bottle of Diet Coke Jeff secretly bought at CVS and wrapped for me.

For the next four years, that red brick apartment building was home. I had two babies in that time, and we took any jobs we could find to make grad school work: Jeff was a teaching assistant; I was a nanny. He shoveled snow and locked up buildings each night for a church; I cleaned houses.

We bought dented cans from the discounted bin at Stop and Shop, and I faithfully dug through piles at the campus thrift store to find clothes for our growing kids. On the day I made an appointment for WIC, I cried.

Still, I almost always loved the challenge of making our budget stretch to fit our needs. We were careful with our money, and because of that, we had everything we needed—and more.

But on Christmas, my mama-heart broke.

Christmas not in budget

No matter how careful we were to save, Christmas was not in the budget.

That was okay when it was just the two of us, and it was even okay when the children were small enough not to know better. But in the years following seminary, when my husband was still working three jobs and our budget wasn’t much bigger, I struggled through the holidays because I wanted so much to make Christmas special for my kids, and it felt nearly impossible to do so.

One year, we had a budget of $10 a kid. Ten bucks. What could I do with ten bucks? They were old enough to feel the difference between a $10 Christmas and the kind their friends got. They were old enough to have wish lists and expectations.

I had expectations.

I crawled into bed that Christmas Eve after doing everything I could to fill stockings with things I’d collected, feeling like I had failed. Even though I had done my best, I felt guilty, like it was my fault I still couldn’t do better for them. I knew they would be so disappointed, and it made me ache.

But I was wrong. My children were never disappointed. In fact, they displayed the same kind of exuberance and gratitude on Christmas morning as I would have expected from a child who had received far more. To this day, they are thrilled to receive homemade gifts, don’t mind a bit if a gift is second-hand, and rarely have wish-lists longer than one or two very reasonable items.

In those hard years, when I thought I was depriving my kids, they were internalizing some very valuable lessons on materialism, gratitude, and the true joy of Christmas. Looking back, I can honestly say I wouldn’t trade that season for anything.

Even now, we keep Christmas simple. It’s much more of a choice these days than it used to be, but the principle stays the same: we don’t need a lot of money to stay within budget and give thoughtfully this year.

Christmas on a zero-budget

Mamas, if this time of year is hard for you because Christmas is not in the budget, my heart goes out to you. I know how hard the struggle can be to give your kids everything they need—and to still fall short this time of year. I know what it’s like to believe that simplicity is good, and yet to feel guilty and inadequate because your kids have to do without…again.

This short series is for you on how to make a magical Christmas on a (nearly) zero budget. In the next few days, I’ll be posting tons of ideas we have gleaned from our thirteen years of “skinny” Christmases. They are all things you can do to give thoughtfully during this season and still stay within budget.

Be forewarned: This is not a series about spending as little as possible (remember, Scrooge was the bad guy); this is about doing the most with what you have so the people in your life feel your thoughtfulness, and you can enjoy this season with your kids and family without feeling a bit inadequate.

I hope you’ll join us, and as always, if you have questions or comments about this series or anything else, please let me know! My goal is to help you choose the better things this season so you can enjoy your family more…even on a zero budget.

In Defense of Black Thursday

It’s that time of year again when people give thanks with one breath and complain about retailers in the next. It seems there’s always something to be unhappy about when it comes to the people who sell us our stuff, especially around the holidays.

This year, most of the grumbling has been about the latest scandal in retail. Not only are more and more stores opening for Thanksgiving, but businesses are luring honest-to-goodness Americans away from their family dinners with Black Friday prices.

Black Friday prices on Thanksgiving? What is the world coming to!

Apparently, there are many reasons we should stand strong against this trend. One of the loudest arguments is the fact that no one should have to work on Thanksgiving. Everyone deserves a day to spend with family, and those greedy corporations are robbing their employees of their turkey rights just to make a buck.

That’s a lovely sentiment. I do not think any worker should be obligated to come in on Thanksgiving when the turkey is roasting away at home.

It’s just too bad we’re so inconsistent about it. We get ourselves in a tizzy over the fact that Walmart employees have to work on Thanksgiving while we sit at home flipping through the channels of football on TV. We watch the Thanksgiving Day parade and the half-time shows as if none of those people are working or away from their families on Thanksgiving.

Well, that’s different, we say, because that’s not commercialism, and really, that’s what we’re against. It’s the commercialism. We don’t want anyone sacrificing family in order to make money.

Really.

Why do you think Al Roker sits out in the cold and broadcasts the Macy’s parade every year? Why do you think the football coaches and players and cheerleaders and hotdog sellers and bathroom cleaners get up and make sure the big game goes off without a hitch?

They do it for money, on Thanksgiving, away from their families, and we support them all the way.

But it’s different, we say, to actually go out and shop on Thanksgiving! That proves that some people are more interested in getting a deal than spending time with their loved ones, and that’s just terrible. They’re probably not even grateful.

Well, I’m convinced. I’m not working on Thanksgiving.

I mean, I’m not getting paid to slave away in the kitchen with a cold bird. I’m also not planning to shop (I’ve got a date with the aforementioned cold bird, after all). I’d feel really good about that except for one problem: I don’t think my Thanksgiving choices make me any more of a grateful, family-centered person than the woman who hits Walmart at 3 am.

Nor do I think Americans are going to turn into the Monsters of Materialism because they get an extra shopping day. Most of America is already there.

It seems to me that we’re all overacting a little bit about this whole shopping-on-Thanksgiving thing. It’s not like Thanksgiving is a sacred institution (it was ordained by Congress, after all).

Don’t get me wrong. Thanksgiving is a good day, and a lovely idea, but it’s not gospel, and we shouldn’t treat it like it is. You’re not going to earn extra gold stars in your heavenly crown if you stay home and eat turkey and think thankful thoughts this Thursday. I dare say, you could even celebrate on Friday instead of Thursday and remain just as holy.

Conversely, standing out in front of Best Buy for a few hours before the kids wake up in order to get a good deal on a TV does not necessarily make you a bad person, any more than sitting in front of your TV on Thanksgiving makes you a bad person.

It kind of depends on what’s going on in your heart (FYI: always). You can have a pretty ugly heart while mixing up the cranberry sauce. And you can be perfectly joyful and godly while shopping on Thanksgiving.

Maybe we should all settle down a little bit and stop equating Black Thursday with a moral apocalypse. After all, our world is crumbling under the weight of bigger problems—bigger moral problems—than retailers who slash prices for Thanksgiving and the people who fall for it. Maybe, if we let go of our turkey-induced legalism, we will notice.

That is what Thanksgiving is all about, isn’t it? Noticing. We should be so grateful for what God has done for us that it overflows into actions for others and shows up in how we treat our family and how we love our neighbors. Even the shoppers.

But too often, we care more about how people spend their holidays than with what’s going on in their lives.

“It’s just wrong to shop on Thanksgiving, and all the people who do it are bad. The end.”

We don’t consider the veteran who needs to work on Thanksgiving just to pay the bills or the mom who has to spend Thanksgiving alone because her kids are with their dad. We don’t think about the fact that sometimes, holidays at home are hard and it’s easier to spend the time walking a store aisle than navigating the eggshells around the dinner table.

What if that guy in line at Best Buy is there because his apartment is lonely this time of year, and for all the church people he knows, not one of them invited him to share the day with them?

Sure, some of the shoppers are materialistic jerks. But before cluck our tongues and say these people have their priorities mixed up, maybe we should think first. Maybe the Thanksgiving shoppers aren’t the ones with the problem.

Maybe we are.