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- When I think back on my childhood, my favorite memories are of Christmas with my sisters and parents on our family farm.
- We didn’t have a lot growing up, but special meals and traditions made our holidays feel magical.
- I’ve applied some of the lessons I learned in childhood to my own family’s holidays to keep costs down, including creating meal traditions, putting a spending cap on gifts, and giving my kids thoughtful gifts.
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When I think of my holidays as a child, I think of Christmas. I remember the scent of cinnamon in the air, the laughter of my sisters, and padding downstairs in my bunny slippers to eat a holiday feast. I think of sipping my mom’s famous banana nog in front of a roaring fire, and the light in my dad’s eyes when I opened the Christmas gift he picked out just for me. No matter what your family’s heritage and tradition, the holidays are a time of love, light, and togetherness. And for me, as a little girl, they were pure magic.
In grownup hindsight, this magic feels almost impossible when I remember another fact of my childhood: I grew up in a low-income home.
My mom was a homemaker and my dad was the vice principal of a struggling private school. We had a farm, but we were not the family dynasty farmers you see in the movies. No, we were “hobby” farmers who butchered a geriatric milk cow and lived on the ground beef she supplied for an entire year. And while we never went hungry, my parents still remember, with a laugh and a wince, their luck in having three daughters who were full after splitting a single cheeseburger.
Discovering the cost of the holidays as an adult
When I first experienced the crushing financial pressure of the holidays as an adult, it was hard for me to square the economic realities of my childhood with the Christmas magic I remember through such a happy, golden haze. But when I forced myself to strip my memories of their nostalgic glow and do the math, I realized that my childhood Christmases weren’t magical in spite of my parents’ small Christmas budget, but because of it.
Many of my holiday memories confirm this theory. Our Christmas decorations were almost entirely homemade: popcorn strings, paper chains, and handcrafted angel ornaments, all made for the price of construction paper, popcorn kernels, and office supplies we already had around the house.
And no, our house wouldn’t have earned a spot in House Beautiful, but the magic I remember wasn’t how stylish our holiday decorations were, but the hours we spent around the table, my sister on the other end of a popcorn string, holding it steady while I added a kernel for every two that I ate, and my dad read “The Nutcracker” out loud to us as we crafted Christmas.
Applying the lessons of childhood to my adult life
That’s only one example of savings, but I’ve taken this truth into my own family’s holiday plans and saved a bundle.
Food costs
For starters, food is a major holiday cost. From your book club insisting you celebrate at a fancy restaurant to the $90 prime rib you serve for your holiday feast, it’s no wonder we all resolve to do better in January after what often feels like a month-long binge.
But here’s a trick I learned from my mother’s frugal holidays: It’s never about the food, it’s always about tradition. My mom’s famous banana nog was the cost of a jug of half-and-half and a couple of bananas, but the magic was in the fact that she served this special treat one time a year. If I’m being honest, I can’t imagine eating turkey and stuffing in the middle of July because, gross, but you better believe that come November my salivary glands activate at the very thought of Thanksgiving dinner.
With this reality in mind, I have made my own family food traditions cheap. Christmas Eve we eat grilled cheese and tomato soup, which costs about $10, and Christmas morning we go big with our toppings and have snowman pancakes for $20. My kids eagerly anticipate both meals all year.
Putting a cap on gift spending for extended family and friends
Another significant holiday cost is all the presents. But my family’s gift-giving is, in a word, thrifty. It’s not a lack of generosity, it’s simply recognizing that no one I love who loves me in return wants me going bankrupt over their gifts. So, I keep our gifts for friends and extended family small and often homemade, with a budget of $5 to $10 a person. A rough count tells me our family hands out roughly 20 of these small…
Read More: 3 lessons to keep holiday costs down, learned growing up low-income