Holiday Impulse Buying

Thanksgiving is coming and with it two of the busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Believe it or not Black Friday was one of my favorite shopping days in addition to the day after Christmas and the month of February. Although I must admit the Black Friday sales have not been very good over the last few years, I still enjoy perusing the sales flyers, looking for gifts. The strange thing is that although I was usually looking for gifts for other people I would usually end up buying more gifts for myself, thinking that this is an ideal price—which by the way wasn’t true, hence the credit card debt.  The other problem I would have is guilt of spending so much money on myself and to some extent I would feel like I needed to get really good thoughtful gifts.

This Christmas will be a little different. I plan to make most of my gifts. Hopefully this will detour me from being out and about looking through the isles. Since I won’t be looking through the stores, I can avoid impulse buying. Earlier this year when Steve and Barry’s closed I bought several plain black fleeces. I plan to buy those embroidered letters and sew them on the fleeces. The letters are about 60 cents each and I paid 96 cents for each of the fleeces. I think it will make a nice, cute, thoughtful and practical gift for my family members. I was also planning to buy coffee mugs, personalize them and make homemade hot cocoa mix for my friends.

Comments

[Rachel]

Oh I love the home made gift ideas!! I should make a fleece for Keilah :)

[Cassie]

I have the same problem with shopping for others--it's so much easier to find "gifts" for yourself and to justify buying them by saying, "I've earned it" and "it is on sale..."

Great idea on the homemade gifts, too. We have an embroidery machine at the pro shop Willie's dad owns, so I might take advantage of that for gifts as well.