It's not for everyone, but there are liberations to allowing yourself to give in to your inner Scrooge.
Not giving at Christmas has become less and less of a dilemma for me. What started as a price limit of £10 on all gifts exchanged between my family of five siblings became, as we realised we were giving each other tat, an almost blanket ban on all of those horrible house-invaders known as presents.
Bring what tasty goodies you could to the party became the principle and now I'm so used to it, I can hardly imagine going back to the last minute trawl of the shops and head-scratching over present lists. This year, a family member proposed a Secret Santa, which seems like a good idea, but is fraught with a kind of clubby groupism – if you're not on the SS rota, you're not going to be giving or getting. My solution has been to get together with a friend and make sweets and condiments for presents. I say we make them, but I mean she makes them – and she does so very well, while I try to control my children. The result is that I think I'm in what often seems to be a minority that likes Christmas. No stress. Not much debt. It's less, bah humbug, and more, shall we make humbugs this year?
What about the children? Infants must have gifts. Last week when I confessed to a friend that I was planning a Christmas gift budget of a tenner for each of my children, he reacted as if someone should call in social services. "Don't worry," I assured him, they'll still get plenty of parcels to open. It's just other people will give them. They're two and four years old. They don't care."
Here is where the Scrooge plan goes awry. Since everyone else is giving to my children I really feel I should be giving them something back. And perhaps a humbug isn't going to be enough?
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