While I try to make these posts mostly about marriage vs parenting, the truth is that once you become parents, a lot of your marriage has to do with parenting- so they do sort of go hand in hand! So this one is about both!  While Michael and I both love giving gifts, from the start of our relationship we always have set some sort of price limit/etc just to try to keep things under wraps (life tip: if you have all shared bank accounts/etc, one of the good solutions we found while Christmas shopping so the other couldn’t discover what was purchased while balancing/checking accounts was to get visa gift cards of the limit amount, and shop on those! Worked so well!).  When we had our first baby, we knew we wanted a Christmas plan that gave our kids a lot of fun and did include some of the fun Christmas traditions that we grew up with (like Santa!) but also built new traditions together and kept the focus of the season on the real reason for it all, celebrating the joy of Christ!  So as we were trying to decide what to do with gifting to make sure it all didn’t get totally out of control, we learned of a plan from a friend that we loved. We decided that first year that we were going to do stockings and 4 gifts for our kids (now with a 5th from Santa), and they follow a theme: Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read.

Each of those gifts are typically pretty small, but it gives them a few things to open on Christmas morning at our home from us, and keeps everything centered on purpose and very reasonable! Once we had 2 kids, we began gifting the something to wear on Christmas Eve, and they are usually some form of matching Christmas pjs that they can then wear through the next day.  The book is always one we pick out pretty intentionally and write in so that when older, those can be the books we keep for them to have for their children (or us for grandchildren), full of 18 years of little notes to them. And the other 2 gifts is usually where the toys and really fun stuff for them comes in!  I wanted to share this simple and intentional gift plan because it has made shopping quite easy for us over the years, and helps us keep track of what we are doing!  For any parents or soon to be parents that are looking for a way to manage it all, this is a great option (and we have used it for each other too, and loved that!).  There aren’t many areas where we are particularly organized (or at least it feels that way!!) in the hectic world of parenting, but this is one I am quite proud of!  The intentionality of choosing gifts with a bit of purpose for them feels really great every year.

How about you- do you have a specific plan for gift giving for your kids or each other? What have you found that works well for you?