Picked your 2009 calendar yet? It’s one of my favorite shopping trips of the year. I shop the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when calendars are 50% off at most bookstores. This started when we were younger and poorer, but now it feels like the sporting way to do it.

Shopping as sport makes me more open to unusual choices:  I might not choose a calendar of baby pigs if I’m paying full-price and choosing from the full line of options, but I might do so if I’m choosing from the picked-over shelves—and sometimes a calendar of baby pigs is the very thing I never knew I needed in my life.
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It’s December 22nd, and I’m feeling a little festive, a little sappy, and a little . . . tense. I mean, I’m trying to get my fa-la-la-la-la on, but either I need to get my entire house cleaned and the kitchen stocked for the grandparents’ impending visit and host the Best Darn Christmas There Ever Was this week — or they’re going to be unable to make it at all due to the crazy Seattle snowstorm. Between the two scenarios, I greatly prefer the first, but they both require at least twelve cookies to even consider.

(I have eaten a LOT of cookies over the last few days.)

In between fretting over holiday-related tasks and being snowed in (FOR FOUR DAYS AND COUNTING) (WITH TWO SMALL CHILDREN MIGHT I ADD) (SORRY FOR THE CAPS LOCK BUT I ASSURE YOU, THE SITUATION WARRANTS), I’ve been thinking about 1) kid-distracting activities, and 2) handmade gifts for certain people on your list who you were going to buy a gift for but hello, SNOWED IN FOR FOUR DAYS, etc.

So! If you’ve got some last-minute gifts to pull together and you’d like them to be of the homemade variety, here’s a list of easy, non-lame crafts you and the kids can whip up in short order.
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Do you realize that Christmas Eve is one week from today?  I’m making a list of gifts that have been given to ME in the past year, gifts that were a success and that you might want to consider buying for someone on your list.

My brother and sister-in-law gave me several pairs of earrings from the Etsy shop Kneehighs-n-Pigtails, and I LOVE them.  They’re so classy and dressy if you’re looking classy and dressy, but they look chic and awesome with t-shirt and jeans, too.
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This year my husband and I have decided to make holiday gift-giving easy on each other — we both have Amazon wish lists propagated with a selection of inexpensive items. Choose gift, add to cart, kerblam: spousal shopping is done.

I suppose it doesn’t sound very romantic, but we’ve got a budget to stick to and about a thousand other holiday-related things to do, and really, the Amazon wish list is a genius invention, anyway. How else would I know that he wanted an actual ant farm? (Note to my husband: I am SO not buying you that thing, because somehow I have the feeling I’ll be cleaning up after eighty billion escaped insects if I do so.)

For those of you who have a dude to shop for and no wish lists on hand, I’ve got a few suggestions from past gifts that have been super successful in our household:
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I am not saying that good things don’t come in small packages, because of COURSE they do.  But sometimes a $20 CD can look, well, smaller than $20.  And sometimes a $20 throw blanket can look bigger than $20.

If you’re cutting down on gift spending this year, you might want to get more bang for your buck, as it were, by saving yourself money—and also giving the recipient a way to save some money themselves.  Or you might be trying to snow your in-laws into thinking you spent more than you did.  I’m not going to look too closely at your motivations, I’m just going to give you some big-looking, small-costing ideas that happen to go along with all the things people say they’re doing to save money these days.
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