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Is it Possible to Have an Incredible Yet Frugal Christmas Celebration?
By Kendra | November 20, 2009
It’s been crazy-busy here, even more so than usual. Do you remember my dear friend Heather, who lost her husband nearly two years ago? God has brought a wonderful man into her life and they are getting married next month! We recorded music for her wedding yesterday, and I’m helping give her a small shower tonight. So privileged to be celebrating with Heather and Phil.
In lieu of a post today, I want to reprint a comment from the last post on celebrating Christmas. Naomi wrote:
Kendra —
This has got to be one of the most refreshing and “releasing” and reminding things I have read on your site (and I have been around here for awhile, lurking of course!)
Thank you for posting it. I am certain I never would have stumbled upon such a thing. I was truly convicted. I thought of Jesus’ first miracle of the wedding at Cana and how it was revelry and delight for all and when he was asked to help provide more, he didn’t rail against all who were enjoying and indulging, he performed a miracle to make a party go better! Seriously? For his first miracle? More excellent libations for the celebration!? It really made me think.
My question comes when we don’t have much (any) extra money at any time of the year, much less Christmas, and it is hard to know how to make a “glorious tree” and all those presents and everything that she talks about when it seems out of possibility financially…
And here was my answer:
Naomi-
I love your observation about the wedding at Cana; it’s one I hadn’t thought of before.
Your question is excellent and one I know many can relate to. Here’s what I’m thinking: What would make this year a bigger celebration for your family? Could it be planning a special breakfast, with some treat you rarely have? For us it’s homemade cinnamon rolls, homemade corned beef hash courtesy of Dad, scrambled eggs, biscuits, and gravy. This is the only day of the year we indulge in a breakfast this way, particularly because Easter always falls on Sunday and we can’t produce such a feast before church.
In fact, you can go back before Christmas morning. Lighting candles every Sunday of advent, reading from Luke, a special dessert each Sunday night leading up to Christmas (and by special I don’t mean extravagant- cookies one night, ice cream another, etc…), paper snowflakes on the windows, Christmas music every day and a time to dance with joy, caroling to the neighbors, A Charlie Brown Christmas, driving around to see the lights…
Make the opening of the presents, even if there’s one per person, a delight. Do it lottery-style, or have each person share something encouraging about the one opening the present at the moment. Open them sloooowly, and ooh and aah.
Real Christmas trees are expensive, and when we had no money I brought a big branch inside (we lived in San Francisco so I really had to search to find one!), “planted” it in a pot with dirt and moss on top, then hung ornaments on the branches. It was cool! If you have silver or gold spray paint, you could spray the branches first.
Invite friends and family over and potluck. We have a barn party every year the day after Thanksgiving and we serve big trays of cookies but ask everyone to bring a chair and a mug. Then we offer coffee and cider, both of which I use coupons to buy in the months before the party. I buy all paper goods the year before on clearance.
We take a day off from school in December and watch Little Women. It’s just a tradition I started and now as my older boys aren’t so interested, I tell them it’s optional (but they tend to hang around…) I make popcorn and hot cocoa, and it’s a memory made.
I’m not super creative, and I’m sure others can offer even better ideas. I hope this is helpful, though.
~Kendra
♥
So, my creative readers, what other ideas can you offer Naomi?
Topics: Life with Preschoolers, Musings and Miscellany | 16 Comments »
November 20th, 2009 at 4:36 am
I think that everything can be made more fun by drawing it out longer – homemade treats rather than boxed, if each person has just one gift, do something to make the process take longer, wrap gifts WITH your children (which will make it take longer!) instead of doing them yourself.
Many fun crafts can be made with inexpensive paper. ANY Christmas tree, no matter how scrawny, will look beautiful with it’s lights turned on, all other lights off in the house, a family singing Christmas carols in the dim light.
November 20th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Kendra – I LOVED your last post about celebrating extravagantly!! Our homeschool holiday break runs from Thanksgiving thru New Year’s!! School always got in the way of all the fun things we like to do for Christmas, So instead of being stressed out trying to ‘get it all done,’ we decided to simply enjoy the season!! We spend a few days deep-cleaning the house (to get ready for it!), then decorating it (you should see all of the things my oldest can do with construction paper and tape in her room!). We bake lots and lots of goodies to share with our neighbors. We host playdates for our friends so their parents can have a night out for dinner and Christmas shopping. We make gifts for each other or do extra jobs around the house to earn money to buy them something they’d like. Christmas music is always ON!! We read Jotham’s Jorney last year, but I think this year we’ll try Bartholomew’s Passage. In past years, we’ve made gingerbread houses (but honestly, I try to get out of this if I can
). Christmas cut-out cookies are always a hit, and I think this year we’ll have some neighborhood kids over to do this with us. Picnics in the car while Dad drives us around looking for the best lights displays and going to the stores to look at all of the beautiful decorations are always a big hit. We host friends traveling thru town on their way to visit family – I’ve always wanted to run a B&B anyway. I am so, SO looking forward to Christmas this year. We have waaaay less money to spend than in years past, but we plan to make the whole month so special that I don’t think the kids will notice 
November 20th, 2009 at 6:47 am
ALWAYS helpful and refreshing and so YOU-ever an encourager, Kenj.
Thank you, and blessings to you and your beautiful family this Thanksgiving! And such WONDERFUL news about Heather!! All Glory to God!
Shannon
November 20th, 2009 at 8:01 am
For your immediate family, use the library! Let the children go to the library and pick out books for their siblings and daddy. Keep your receipt on hand so you can renew a few times and wrap them and put them under the tree.
I too love your posts Kendra. The presents, color, music, decorations, etc. tell our children, “This day is special!”
~Susan G.
November 20th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Off topic~ but when you read Crazy Love will you also give us your thoughts? That one has blipped up on my radar a couple of times recently and I am curious also. (I saw your comment on Copperswife.)
November 20th, 2009 at 9:14 am
My kids love love love to craft, so I really make a point to do a lot with them. I encourage my older girls to make their gifts. I let them paint…which is rare around here. We bake. I let them help. Dollar store has inexpensive craft supplies. We try to bless others. One year I bought 5 $5 starbucks cards to hand out to those service workers at the stores and gas stations I go to. I am blessed to not have to work outside the home, so I like people that help me to know i appreciate them. Let you kids pick out a candy bar and after it is paid for let them hand it to your cashier. The surprise and joy on the face of someone often times grumpy with having to work so hard during the season is priceless. This year I am making my girls gifts. We are blessed to be able to take a special trip, so Christmas morning will be simple. To think extravagant might just mean to think memory makers. Bless you all!
November 20th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Kendra, I love these posts, the last post about Christmas was so nice I read it aloud to my husband. I agree completely with that sentiment!
One thing my husband and I do that really draws out the decorating of the tree is to string popcorn to hang as garland on the tree, man is that tedious, I mean fun
It’s cheap too and you can snack as you go.
As a child we always drove around the neighborhoods looking at the big Christmas light displays.
My husband loves advent calendars, and you can make a nice advent banner out of felt with a pocket for each day that contains a small treat (an m&m for each child, a piece of homemade fudge, a hershey’s kiss, a quarter, gum, etc.)
Ooo, I’m getting all excited about Christmas now! Maybe I’ll get started sewing my SIL and MIL’s gifts a bit early
~Manda
November 20th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Again this is GREAT! I love the idea of making Christmas special in just the little things we do..breakfast, desserts, stories, making special traditions…awesome!
Sommer
November 20th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Thank you for these ideas! I love the idea of watching Little Women…which version do you like best? I prefer the one w/Elizabeth Taylor and June Allison. We have annual library week during “Christmas Vacation” and we visit at least one library per day in the area (or sometimes out of the area) and sometimes have the kids write what they liked about each one/disliked, or we just talk about it. We LOVE libraries, and this is always something fun to look forward to!
November 20th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
One thing we are going to do this year is unwrap a new Christmas book on each advent Sunday. Books could be bought or borrowed.
Also every Christmas eve we have pancakes and pjs, we buy the kids new pjs, but any will do. Pancakes are cheap!!! I am considering changing our xmas eve tradition to more shepherd like fare, reading the xmas story, and perhaps watching the Nativity or similar. The idea is to make Christmas eve all about Jesus, Christmas day will then be all about presents/santa/etc.
November 21st, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Our Christmas celebrations this year are going to be quite frugal as we are in the process of adopting but my husband made a good point the other day that I thought I’d share. He said as long as we make an effort to be joyful and enjoy the next month or so with the kids by playing lots of games with them and getting in some good quality family time, they will love it and have great memories. He is right. It really is the simple things. Today we decorated for Christmas and I was reminded how true that is. We let the kids decorate their rooms. We have one old scraggly Christmas tree in the garage that we don’t use anymore and so our daughter set that up in her room and put all of her homemade ornaments on it. She thinks it is beautiful! Our soon used all the strings of colored lights that I never use to make his bunkbed look like a “Christmas cave”.
Also, I always pack away the Christmas stuffed animals that they received years ago from grandma. So every Christmas the kids go wild when they get to unpack the tubs and find their Christmas stuffed animals. I started doing that b/c I cannot stand having so many stuffed animals all over the house but it has been the best thing. They are new every year! The kids just play and play with them for weeks! And I don’t have to spend a dime!
Today they made a “Christmas store” with all of the Christmas coloring books and activity books that I had packed away from last year. I actually saved some presents that they got last year and packed them away so they have lots of new coloring books to enjoy this year. They get so much at one time at Christmas. I like to be strategic and pack some of the things that they aren’t immediately interested in away for a rainy day or even the next year. We had a wonderful day today just being together with nothing on the schedule!
November 21st, 2009 at 6:13 pm
This year, we are doing Lisa Whelchel’s book about Advent and it looks to be so much fun! She uses household/common things for object lessons and ties in the things we do today (Christmas tree, candy cane story, etc.) with Christ. This year, we are making cards for every resident of our local nursing home. It is heart-rending how many of these patients never even get a visitor, let alone a card of any kind. We are also making a few different varieties of cookies and wrapping them up to give them. We will be doing this on a school day (we homeschool). I recently read an article for homeschoolers that this is one of the most wondrous times in our childrens’ lives for creating memories, traditions and showing them God’s love and service in a real way, so much so that they are learning invaluable lessons that we just can’t teach through “book learning”. It provoked me to decide to tread lightly on school lessons for the next month and to focus on THIS holiday, THIS year because we really aren’t promised another year, are we? I want to treasure this time for every moment I have …..my oldest is 15 and my baby is 2 and it seems only last night my 15 year old WAS my 2 year old. It goes too fast. I am enjoying your blog as always, thanks for great ideas and suggestions!
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:14 am
What great ideas. We wrap up 24 Christmas books and let the kids open one each night leading up to Christmas. I keep a “cheat sheet” of what book is coming next and do something special to go along with the book if I can. Example~ For The Candy Cane Story I will give the kids candy canes to eat while daddy reads. We have a ton of books but this could be done from the library as well.
Blessings,
Dawn
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:24 am
We have a fun game to play that helps stretch out the present opening. I will wrap one small gift (last year it was a $5 but it could be anything) and then I keep putting it in larger and larger boxes, each one wrapped. Then I roll a dice to get the magic number. The kids then take turns rolling and if they roll the magic number they get to unwrap a box until all the boxes are unwrapped. I think this year I might put a little bit of candy so when the final box is unwrapped the “winner” gets to share the booty!
November 29th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
WHEW! This sure was refreshing as we look forward to the season!! I can’t wait to slow down a little and do these things!! Thanks!!
December 12th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I love the day off for Little Women and may have to do that with my Little Women! (and Little Men!)