Christmas

[Shining]

I absolutely love christmas and the magic for the children. My husband and I won't exchange gifts but for me it's all about my large family and the grandchildren. Having said all that it has to be frugal and has been for the past few years.

Daughter who is arty is making a stocking for each of the granchildren with their names on this year and going to fill them with little goodies.

I save for park vouchers and the grandchildren have £20 each to spend and I take advice from their parents.

Sometimes it's hard telling people things are changing but it has to be done. Dont' make yourself short to keep someone else happy it's not worth it in the long run.

[Struzzo39]

I just love christmas and everything about it. It has been tough whilst in the IVA especially since our 6 year believes that father christmas is the richest man in the world and can bring him anything. Ha! We too do online surveys and go without things as adults to try and scrimp and save so our 2 boys aren't affected by our mess. Its hard infact very hard but to see their faces is just priceless. For otheres my hubby is a really good cook and we have often made up hampers for family members which have gone down a treat. x

[lem]

I love christmas too, it really is my favourite time of the year, we have managed to get the kids what they wanted mostly bit have bought things throughout the year and saved from our allowances, for the rest of our family we set a budget of £15-20 each and that's that, we certainly couldn't afford the kind of sums SusieQ talks about, but then even before the IVA we never spent those kinds of amounts on extended family anyway so we've not had to 'cut back' so to speak

[footiemad]

In our family we just buy for our children. We have an agreement in place with sisters, in-laws etc that we won't exchange presents and that suits us just fine. Hubby and me don't buy for each other but we do get a lot of fun watching the kids open their pressies x

[country girl]

I have the same arrangement in my family. Daughters know about IVA both of them are hard up so it will just be token presents. I bought them plenty when they were younger too much.

I am not keen on Christmas either its just too commercialised I bet it is causing a lot of worry for many people this year.

[Niobe]

I can't believe the number of houses I have seen that already have their decorations up.

Way too early.

[Skippy]

I'm getting the lights out this weekend to make sure they work and I'm hoping to get the decorations up next weekend - once December is here I'll get more into the Christmas spirit!

[Niobe]

Ours will go up at the beginning of December, just think it's too early to have them up now. We have a string of lights across the front of the house and that's it apart from our very small fibre optic tree.

[Shining]

I love putting mine up the first weekend in December, that's the 1st or 2nd this year for me then. x

[Foggy]

Ours will go up a week before the 25th and come back down again shortly after the New Year bounces in upon us.

[Niobe]

Ours come down on the 2nd January.

[Shining]

I'll always take mine down before I go back to work so around the same time as Niobe for taking them down and my house looks bare!

[Skippy]

Mine will go up next weekend and come down on 6th January. We have a 6ft tree, 2 LED penguins, fairylights around the living room and a string of lights across the front window - I do like sparkly lights!

[Niobe]

I always think the lights look sad once Christmas is over. I think once we are on our own at Christmas we won't put any up at all.

[Skippy]

Before we redecorated I had fairy lights around the living room all year round. I'll probably leave some up this year. Dave did draw the line when I wanted to leave the penguins out all year!