The Gift Plan

After a prolific amount of autumn birthdays, I have now found myself in the midst of Christmas. Inspired by the holiday decorations around the house, the bell merrily jingling on the dog’s collar, and the abundant advertisements sent via mail, TV and internet, I was re-energized for gift giving. Running to the mall and Christmas fairs almost every weekend, searching the net and e-bay, I got a multitude of presents that I tried to put some thought into. [To the people who are now receiving checks from me, it’s not because I didn’t want to put thought into it, quite frankly either you need the money to pay rent or you want stuff I could never afford.] However during the sales and Christmas cheer, my idea of a $10 per present budget quickly flew into the void. I saw my credit card bills and realized that my budget did not quite recover from the continuous birthdays throughout October and November. I also just realized that there are more birthdays come February and March. Which means two things…one, some of you might be only getting lunch or drinks on me when I see you over my vacation and two, I need to come up with a plan for next year. Here are some ideas:

1) Have some sort of pot-luck/gift swap party, so we only need to get one gift for everyone at the party, even if it includes non-mutual friends. (This one we had discarded this year due to the complexity of the arrangements, but I might suffer through it next year.)

2) Give everyone a “Andrea lottery ticket” meaning you get a raffle ticket from me and the lucky friend gets $100, which by the way the odds are better than a real lottery ticket.

3) Get everyone a real lottery ticket for $2, along with a candy cane as a consolation prize.

4) Realizing that all the ideas above don’t really put much individual thought into the presents, I could also do a budgetary x-mas plan. Meaning, I list all my friends out and give 2-3 present each month telling them not to open until x-mas. In this way, I can eliminate excess storage and be able to streamline my expenses over the year. I can also proportionally budget slightly more presents in the beginning of the year, in case new unexpected friends or other types of obligation giftees arise during the period or to overcome lumps in the budgets due to excess birthdays. Or even better, if I arrange to give the x-mas gift in cohesion with birthdays, I will probably be able to reduce gift expenses by at least 25-50%.

5) Suck it up, try to earn more money or keep eating ramen, and all will be good.