Cost & type of Xmas gifts this year

B

beaky

Registered User
Messages
180
What sort of gifts are people buying for this Christmas for family and friends? I do not want to be Scrooge but I recon we will spend €1000 that we dont have(ie credit card) and that only includes 10 good friends between us. Santy comes to our 3 year old!!! The rest is family(16 'uncles'/'aunts', 24 cousins, 6 x parents or grand aunts and a few other bits and pieces.

Interested to know what others are doing/spending.
 
Do they all buy you a present back?
We do Kris Kringle, so we buy 1 present for a family member. We also buy smaller presents for nieces and nephews, certainly not €1000.
 
I buy presents for my wife, our children, my mother, my sisters, my sister's kids and .. that's it.

Total spend will be more than €500, but not that much more. Probably (hopefully) less than €700. I finance this through saving for known spend (car tax, car insurance, family holiday) over 10 months of the year. The other 2 months are freed up to fund Christmas.
 
I am stunned. It is madness to be buying presents for 50 people who are not immediate family.

Do you get 50 presents in return ?
How many of these people are, like you, feeeling the pressure of all this unnecessary spending ?

I know you probably might be embarrassed to eb the first to say it, but maybe they would be relieved if you announced that instead of buying presents, that you are giving a donation to a charity and dont want anything in return.

Its a nice gesture, it will break the cycle and will cost you a lot less than 1000.
 
Ya those were the replys I was expecting alright. We were thinking of just getting "family" presents this year like bottle wine+big box biscuits/choc's. There would be only about 25 to get then at maybe €20 each = €500. Kris Kindle is another good idea but hard to organise as everyone is spread around the country.

We do get presents back usually but thats not the point for us. True to say every one is feeling the pinch these days so I would have no problem being he first to change things.

Saw an article on the paper some weeks ago with details of how much people in different countrys spent at christmas and Ireland seemed to be spending more than most. Seem to recall the average was 1100,to include festive food (turkey etc) and drink. That is what got me thinking I was over-spending.
 
Beaky get a grip. Those days of spending money we dont have are long gone.
Break the cycle and be done with it.
 
The last thing we need in our household is more "junk". The timbers are groaning. Slowly but surely we have been offloading a lot of stuff to charity shops etc. Our message that goes out is if you are buying us something we must be able to eat or drink it. We have been making up food hampers that seem to go down well. It's like giving cash back to people but not quite. We have been purchasing slabs of fillet beef and we stick them in our freezer. They don't collect their gift from under the Christmas tree but from the freezer.......unwrapped.
 
My husband comes from a family of 12. We had that problem as well - our kids are now in their 30s. After a few years of all this 'carry-on' of trying to get presents for everybody, one of my sister-in-laws suggested we break this habit and just get presents for our own children/family. There was no problem at all and I'd say everyone was delighted. It just needs one of the family to suggest it nicely.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top