Christmas Q&A | Outdoor lights, stockings, gift exchanges, and more!

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

(edit: Though Christmas is the holiday that I celebrate, and though most of the questions readers submitted were Christmas-specific, I hope that those of you that celebrate other holidays are able to find some helpful and applicable ideas in these posts. Please know that I am not purposely excluding other holidays, but that I’m very much not an expert in those other holidays…Christmas is what I know, and so Christmas is what I talk about. 😉 If you know of some great online frugal resources about other December holidays, though, do feel free to leave a link in the comments.)

Do you decorate the outside of your house, and if so, how did you start the process of accumulating those decorations?

-Engineer Mom

We do decorate outside, but not in a super fancy way because Mr. FG and I both lack the patience required to cover the house in lights!

We have some lightsicles that hang from the front overhang of our house, some colored lights that go on our bushes, and a gaudy string of colored lights that goes on our mailbox, and we usually string some plain white lights over our doorway.

We also have shaped window lights that we hang in our 4 front windows, but I don’t know if those count as outside lights! You can see two of them in this 365 photo.

We’ve bought most of our Christmas lights at after-Christmas clearance sales…I highly recommend that! I’ve also managed to find some new-in-the-box lights at Goodwill.

I’m a big holiday baker, but this is the first year that I’ve ever actually paid attention to how much I was spending at the grocery store. I’m trying to keep my family (I live with my parents and do the grocery shopping for the 3 of us) on a $100 per week budget, but I’m thinking I’m going to have trouble staying within those limits with all the holiday baking I plan to do.

This weekend, in addition to the regular groceries, I bought extra sugar (brown and white), eggs, and an extra 2 pounds of butter. This sent me $15 over, even though I bought the store brands and used a coupon for the eggs. I don’t like the Aldi in my area (it’s a bad neighborhood), and while I shop loss leaders and use coupons when I can, I’m worried about spending too much trying to bake goodies for work and as gifts. Any advice?

-Elizabeth

Butter is definitely one of the more expensive ingredients for baking, so rich butter cookies and the like will definitely cause an increase in grocery spending.

If you’re wanting to go on the cheap with holiday baking for gifts, I highly recommend going the yeast bread route. Even rich yeast breads generally don’t require nearly as much butter as quick breads and cookies do, aimply because excessively fatty yeast dough resists rising.

I’ve found giving loaves of something like Cinnamon Bread to be significantly cheaper than giving cookies or quick breads. Plus, since not a lot of people are good at yeast baking, the recipient is usually thrilled to receive it. It’s a nice change from the ubiquitous cookie.

If the yeast option is not possible for you, you could try cutting some other things out of your food budget in November and December to give you some extra money for baking supplies. For instance, maybe you could eat vegetarian meals more often, or have a few more simple soup, salad, and bread meals.

1) How do you get families to agree to draw names?

2) Do you have any good gift suggestions for 20-something couples who don’t need house stuff, and you don’t see them that often? (These are grown nieces and nephews, but they celebrate all together with my husband’s sisters and mom, so it would feel weird to get gifts for only part of those at the celebration.) And I have to mail these, so that precludes a food gift basket or something heavy.

-Jenny

Well, on my side of the family, my older brother suggested it, and none of us had an issue with it. It was a very peaceful decision. 🙂

I guess you have to know your family and decide whether or not this is a suggestion that will go over well.

If you do decide to broach the subject with your family, find a peaceful, neutral time to do it (a time long before Christmas might be good), and just present your case kindly with a list of benefits (we can all save money, we can be less stressed, we can spend more time enjoying each other than shopping).

I really, really like the drawing names thing we do with my siblings. We still have the joy of buying presents for each other, but it’s not hard or stressful. Actually, having just one person (well, two since Mr. FG has a present assignment too) makes this process more fun for me. I can pour more time and money into a gift if my gift list is smaller.

As far as your second question goes, I’d suggest gift cards or certificates for restaurants, movie theaters, or music downloads. They’re light and small for mailing purposes, and I bet a young couple would appreciate that sort of thing. I know Mr. FG and I would have! Other ideas are a magazine subscription or a subscription to a paid-membership website (like Cook’s Illustrated).

We draw names between our adult siblings. We usually have a budget of $50 – $75 per gift. But with 2 on my side and 2 on my husband’s side….we’re spending $200+ on adult gifts, not to mention the nieces and nephews we buy for! I sew and love to make my gifts, but is there anyway to do this without looking incredibly cheap? After all, they spend $50-$75 on each of us. I don’t want my siblings or my husband’s siblings dreading that we’re the ones who drew their name on any given Christmas!

-Kristen

WilliamB answered this on the post where you left the question, and said exactly what I was going to say! If you think it would go well, I would suggest talking with your siblings to see if they would be ok with putting a cap on the gift spending. Maybe everyone would agree to a $30 cap, or something like that.

Another option is to try to be really smart about your shopping. For instance, if your brother wants a $75 boxed movie set, maybe you could find a new one on half.com for $40. That way the value of the gift is high, even though you didn’t spend as much. Thrift store and clearance shopping can yield the same results.

Hopefully your siblings are gracious enough to not be looking at this exchange in a mercenary manner (“We spent $75 on her and I can’t believe she only spent $30 on me!”). I know that Mr. FG and I never think about our sibling gift exchange in this way…a gift is a gift, not a financial transaction, and we would never want someone to spend beyond their means to buy us a gift!

On my side of the family, only the adults do a gift exchange, and we don’t buy presents for all the nieces and nephews. My siblings and I currently have 11 children between us, with one more coming in the spring, so trying to buy for all the kids is just too overwhelming. Keeping the gift exchange limited to the adults saves us all time, money, and keeps us from being overly stressed.
What do you put in your children’s stockings?

-Lisa

That varies some from year to year, but candy is always a big part of what fills their stockings. Other things we sometimes add are drawing supplies, like markers or pencils, fun bath supplies, like fizzers, small toys, jewelry, and hair doo-dads. If I’ve bought some presents that are small in size, sometimes I’ll put them in the stocking instead of wrapping them.

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Readers, what about you? How do you stuff stockings? Do you have cheap baking advice, or gift ideas for young couples? Weigh in!

Today’s 365 post: Do you know what these are?