Family Matters
MommyLiberty5013
member
Dear Community,
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
RE: Christmas Giving.
After reading the PP about the MIL and the massive record player (you poor dear! That's sooo awful. And, yay for heirloom!), I was wondering how you all handle Christmas giving.
It used to be in my family that we each bought everyone a gift. It was Mom, Dad, Sis, BIL, DH, Grandpa and Grandma on my side, plus my two kids.
Last year we did secret Santa and had a limit of $30. This year we did an exchange based on the first letter of each person's first name. A's give to C' and C's give to D's and D's give to J's, etc. Our limit is $50.
So what do you all do?
I just think Christmas giving has gone waaaay overboard these recent years.
Re: RE: Christmas Giving.
I don't buy for my siblings anymore, just their kids. And my parents usually get homemade food from me. None of us need or want any more stuff, and none of us expect to get crap from each other. It works out beautifully
I just can't seem to get H on board. He insists on giving his family crap they don't want or need that they will not use. (Even gift cards go unused as his parents are unwilling to go anywhere to redeem them. Seriously live in a town with a locally owned grocery store and a couple crappy restaurants, and that's it. Walmart is an hour away, and thus a major ordeal to them to travel all the way there.) It irks me to no end that he insists on spending so much $ on crap for them - especially when they don't use it or even muster up the energy to return it for something else!
Ugh. Plus, anything he sends never gets acknowledged. No text, email, phone call, or note to say thanks or even that they received it. I'm so over them.
My MIL and FIL passed this year so we're only buying gifts for my parents, one of my brothers (he's not married) and my nieces/nephews. When we have a child, we will no longer get gifts from my siblings or parents, our child will get the presents.
I also buy for my cousins and my aunt and uncle on one side of the family, because we spend both xmas day and xmas eve with them. I wish we could get rid of these gifts, but its' down to a 10 or $15 gift this year-- so I end up buying my cousin and his fiance a bottle of wine and my aunt and uncle a subscription to the local magazine for a year. every year. The hardest is my 16 yr old cousin who i end up getting a gift card to for itunes, the movies, etc.
We do an exchange at work too, which is annoying because again it's another 5-10$ gift. So i think instead this year I am going to suggest we just all get lunch one day and bring in a baked good to share. Kind of like a little cookie swap (there are only 3 of us)
I don't buy for friends except for my one closest friend and I just emailed her to ask that instead of buying gifts, let's have a girls date one night- go to the movies, for a martini etc....i think time together would be better than another bottle of lotion or perfume
We used to give presents to everyone. Now we moved too far to even ship presents so whenever we travel back to our hometown we bring enough gifts to cover a year's worth of special occasions.
Sadly we hardly ever get anything from anyone.
ETA - well we do receive presents from our parents
THis is one of the bigger differences in my marriage and it has taken us 6 years to get it working.
My family has always downplayed Christmas giving, for three reasons. One, we want to focus on the religious reasons for the season; two, we always drove to Virginia from Western NY and we didnt have room for tons of gifts, but mostly because 87% of my family (immediate and extended) have birthdays within 30 days of December 25th. It gets too expensive.
So my parents spent the money and bought the wow gifts for the birthdays and kept Christmas presents down to 3 gifts (likethe magi gifts) and one from santa. The santa gift was the coolest, but they all were not the "bigt ticket item" that everyone wanted that year. My Siblings, who were born in December, all got that "must have" gift for their birthdays.
DH, on the other hand, comes from a very poor family. My MIL focused on Christmas so her kids would not feel left out or be teased by the other kids. So she used layaway and saved all year long for a huge holiday.
We have moved more towards my way of thinking, mainly because we are poor (DH retired from the USAF and neither of us have a job and the pension, while ok is not enough to raise 2 kids on). It is so much easier to spread the money out over the year, especially when we have DD and SD both born in the beginning of January.
As for our extended familyS.
My Side have always done just the kids (my sister has us purchase things for her dog...which is fine by us because I know dog ownership is expensive) for Christmas and then will do each other for birthday.
DH's side JUST instituted this rule last year. Which is great, because I refused to do any shopping for them after the 4th year where I recieved a $15-$20 gift cards to a store that I could not shop at (we were overseas and TJ Maxx doesnt ship). This after I spent hours and hundreds of dollars on them.
We spend about $50 on each of our neices & nephews. And for the adults, we have a pollyanna with my family and another pollyanna with my in-laws, both of which have a $50 cap.