I was saying about how we'll not be buying a tree this year, since we're saving up for the house we should be closing on in January. We do have a little tabletopper fake tree we've had for years, so there will be a token tree.
We were also talking about scaling back in spending. On that note, I recall many a January as a child where heated conversations ensued over CC bills from Xmas spending. It was part of why I was determined to not do the overspending in later years when I was an adult. Before we met, my spouse had a habit of giving everyone the same inexpensive but thoughtful present. (e.g. One year it was action figures with a "you are my hero" theme. ) When we married, we kept to that tradition. Many of them, at least in part, of a home made variety. I like home made gifts even when they're not my style, as it were. My dad's parents used to give everyone a homemade each year before they passed, with maybe a little fun money inside for the youngsters. A few years it was a Xmas ornament. My favorite is a mailbox with our family name on it. My grandfather painted them all. That one always makes the tree.
One year, since we love antique marbles, we gave everyone a small mason jar with the flip close at the top filled with an assortment of old marbles to make up a standard "set" to play, making sure we pointed out which ones were the Christmas Tree style. Many folk joked about finding our marbles that year.
(When I was a kid, I grew up in a shore town, and we used to have marble tournaments each summer on the beach. They may still, I don't know. They had I think it was maybe four or six huge poured concrete slabs on raised platforms just for that tournament.) Another year we gave out a partly handmade game. In my family we play a Rummy variant we called Hearts, but it's not the game folks usually think of when hearing that name. Everyone got a small round cheesebox with a folded felt gameboard, a deck of cards, and a copy of the rules inside. The short version of the rules is you have a board where each round, everyone throws a penny on each spot for "penny" cards, almost all of which are heart suite. If you have one of the penny cards and you you play it before someone else runs out of cards, you get to take however many pennies have collected on that spot. At the end of each summer, my family would take the tin that had all the "Kitty" pennies in it, and cash them in before going to get ice cream at a favorite place in Stone Harbor, NJ.
Now, as we're older, there's very few gifts we give out, since we rarely can get everyone together at once given how widespread each of our family branches have become. I kind of miss the "everyone gets the same" presents. They were fun to plan and give.
Hopefully Santa will see I'm being good despite it all. we talked about gift giving and decided we didnt' have to stress each other over it but we will get little presents for mom and the kids in our family. I had my contractor friend over last night and he checked out my drywall taping job and thought it was done pretty nicely. I figured he'd say gee isn't it done yet