Christmas on a budget

I've opened and closed this post writing page several times over the last few months. Laziness is mostly the reason for why I never bothered to write an update. I feel like if I'm going to write a blog entry, it needs to be engaging and in some way humorous. Very little in my life is funny right now. So I just opted to neglect my blog. Now, I've decided to think of this as my vanity project. I will talk about me and only me (mostly). If you do not find my blog entertaining, you can just stop reading it. I will not go into details about all of what's going on in my life, as a lot of it is not mine to share. I'll just say that this past year has been the worst year of my life to date. Melodramatic? Yes, but it is also the truth.

I don't want to have a pity party in this post. I want to talk about what my family did for Christmas this year, because all the people I have told about it really liked the idea, and that makes me happy. This post will likely read like a "what I did over my summer vacation" report. Imagine me standing in front of you, a printed out copy of this post in my sweaty hands as I'm wearing my nicest and brand new "back to school" outfit.

This year, my family banned the purchase of Christmas presents and opted for "Crafty Christmas". Like many families, mine has been affected by the rather dismal economic climate. I always knew that I was privileged to have what I had. When my mom told me that there wasn't money in the grocery money for tampons was when it occurred to me that shit had changed. Obviously I had noticed that we had started going without other things, but tampons are crucial! So I finally started buying my own tampons (and soap and other stuff because really, I should have been doing that by now anyway).

One of my sisters worked at a job that had shitty pay,another sister had no job, my parents had a tight budget and really, none of us make the big bucks. The prospect of buying Christmas presents was both overwhelming and rather depressing. My mother came up with the brilliant idea that we should craft one another Christmas presents. At first I thought it was kind of stupid, because to me crafting is sewing or knitting or scrap booking. I do none of those things. I can do manual labor, read fast, and play video games for hours. Any of the other unmentioned skills that I have would not yield gifts either. But my mom pointed out that crafting is anything you make. Well, I made lists of things that I thought I would be able to make for my family members. Before I go into the amazing things I managed to make, let me tell you the golden rule of Crafty Christmas. You cannot buy a straight up Christmas present, but in order to craft something you have to first buy the raw materials. This is the wonderful loophole that allowed me to craft what I crafted.

So around October I had written a list of what I would like to make for everyone. I would reference this list occasionally, but it was mostly ignored until right before thanksgiving when I started to panic because I had a month to make 7 Christmas presents. What were these presents, you ask? Well, here's the list, the supplies that I purchased are in parentheses and other supplies I used but had are in square brackets:
Michael: Batman shoes (black canvas shoes, white out pens, yellow sharpies) [water proofing spray, printer paper, packing tape]
Dina: Dessert Cookbook  (assorted nifty scrap book paper, black sharpie, glue sticks) [printer paper, colored pens, packing tape, post it notes, magazines]
Lara: Tote bag (the tote bag itself) [iron on transfers] and "hang in there" cat cross stitch hanging (this was a "learn to cross stitch!" kit so all I supplied was the will power)
Amanda: "jacketses for life" embroidered cardigan (cardigan, 1 skein embroidery floss, embroidery scissors) [needles, printer paper, free hobbiton font, determination, assorted buttons]
Dad: Wall art (spray paint, ply wood) [printer paper, scissors]
Mom: Journal (Composition notebook, scrapbook paper, stickers) [brown paper, packing tape]
Steve: Custom board game (foam board, sharpies, card stock, 5 die) [printer paper, glue sticks, nail polish, pens)

Okay, so that doesn't look too hard, right? Well, while working on Dina's gift, my tendency to be a perfectionist kicked in. The more I crafted these gifts, the more detailed and/or time consuming each one got. I didn't even finish Amanda's gift until this past week because embroidery takes a lot longer than I thought it did. But the important part about this is that all of these gifts took a lot of time and effort to make, which means that you really love that person if you finish it. I can't even tell you how many movies I watched between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it was a lot. I also spent a lot of time crafting with my family members. Amanda and I did a collaborative gift for Dad, and then the two of us teamed up with Michael to make Steve's excellent board game. Were these gifts the nicest newest pieces of technology? No. Were we all happy anyway? Yes. Here's where the shit gets deep.

Two years ago, I felt a flash of disappointment on Christmas Eve because I had opened all of my presents and hadn't received the single item I had asked for. I wanted a digital camera. I had told my parents that. So why was it that I had not gotten one? At the time, I didn't feel the least bit disgusted with this feeling of having been cheated. Turned out that my boyfriend had gotten one for me and told my parents so they wouldn't buy me one. I found this out the next day when we exchanged gifts. I want to say the camera was probably...$150. I can't even tell you what I got for Christmas that year besides that camera. It was all giving and receiving gifts, not taking the time to appreciate what I had even received. I can say that the sum monetary value of all of my gifts this year was less than $100. I might have spent $100 on crafting supplies, a quarter of that being the cardigan part of Amanda's gift. But I am happier with my awesome red knitted hat from Dina, or my hand painted photo frames from Lara, or my custom t-shirt from Amanda than I would have been with an iPod.

Crafty Christmas saved Christmas for my family. We spent time together crafting and talking about what to make for the other members of the family. I learned how to cross stitch and embroider, but I also learned that I can make a mean stencil and am quite handy with a pair of scissors. Packing Tape is my new go-to craft supply. White Out pens are no longer just for fixing mistakes. I have lots of ideas for my family for next Christmas, and I can only imagine what new and fun things I'll learn in the process. Christmas could have been stressful due to limited funds, but instead it was stressful because I didn't give myself enough time to craft. I hope that next Christmas, we can have a mixture of crafted gifts and thoughtful store bought ones as well. I'm hoping things improve for my family and for all the other families that had a rough holiday season this year. But I know that if they don't, my family will still have Crafty Christmas and one another :)

-MeggyB