According to the screamingly massive display of barbecue-and-football-themed cards I saw at Target last weekend, Father’s Day is coming up. We’ve covered some gift ideas in the past, so if you’re looking for inspiration, check here and here.

This time around I thought I’d focus on a few keepsake-type Father’s Day gifts that incorporate photos. What father can resist photos of his own adorable children? Sure, he may have preferred that fancy stainless steel infrared grill, but hey, it’s not like we got diamonds on Mother’s Day, IS IT?
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Oh look, May 10th is just around the corner! My favorite time of year, the day I get pampered, served breakfast in bed, showered with gifts, and . . . what? Sorry, was my sarcastic snorting and eye-rolling distracting you?

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More and more often I turn to Etsy.com when I need a special gift but don’t want something too corny.  When Paul and I had our 10-year anniversary, he chose me a pair of earrings from Etsy, because he knew I’d like just about anything he found there—and that he’d be likely to avoid the dreaded heart pendant the stores are always pushing on bewildered guys.

For Mother’s Day, Etsy is a great place to find a gift that doesn’t suggest that the giver chose it at random from the “Mother’s Day Specials!” flier that came from the department store.
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Oh, hey, it’s nearly Valentine’s Day!  And perhaps this year spending money on dinner or jewelry…isn’t practical.  Those of you who use terms like “Hallmark Holiday” and say “I don’t need a special day to say I love you” can nevertheless continue reading:  these are tips that could also apply to, say, a non-special day in March.

When my husband and I go on a date, we like to go to Barnes & Noble or to Borders, big book stores where we can browse around, sit in soft chairs, read the merchandise, etc.  If we’re feeling rich, we might buy some stuff—but we often don’t even when we can (the part we like is the quiet and the uninterrupted), so it doesn’t seem sadly different if we’re feeling poor and don’t buy anything, or buy a couple of things from the bargain section.
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Oh hey, another holiday is looming around the corner, BLEAH. I mean, oh, Valentine’s Day, my FAVORITE, I choo-choo-choose YOU!

(BLEAH.)

Please just tell me I’m not supposed to send in Valentines to my 3-year-old’s preschool. The teachers would warn us about this, right? Or is it just one of those Things that Good Parents Know About? ARRRGH.

While I’m stewing over the possibility of needing to make cards for a classroom of kids whose names my son cannot be trusted to accurately pronounce (one girl has been known in our household as “Prafarsha” forever, because that’s what he said her name was. FALSE), please enjoy some Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Guys, should you be shopping for the occasion.
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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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‘Tis the season for this blog to start talking about gift ideas and tips for surviving the holidays without blowing your budget or losing your mind. There’s a lot of great stuff already lurking in the gift category archives, and we’ll be posting more entries on this subject over the next few weeks.

I see I wrote a post almost a year ago on charitable gift ideas, which is sort of what I planned to talk about today. More specifically, how do you get your kids to embrace charity, in the middle of a season designed to overload their brains with GIMME? My own children are too young to fully grok the notion of . . . well, much of anything about the holidays yet (my 3-year-old just asked me this morning if Santa was a pirate. I guess “Ho ho ho” does sound a lot like “Yo ho ho”), but I’d definitely like to create some traditions that involve all of us thinking about more than just our Amazon wish lists each year. Here’s a few activities I’ve been thinking would be good to do with kids during the holiday season:

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