21 Dec, 2014
Christmas gifting at Casa Fishbowl
By andrea tomkins in Easy ways to make kids happy,parenting
This is where my brain has been these past couple of weeks:
This is where my brain has been as I walked and up down Westboro and West Wellington/Hintonburg (two of my favourite shopping districts in Ottawa!), and this is where my brain was as I spent untold minutes idling in abysmal Merivale Road traffic yesterday.
The “four gift” idea has been making its way around the internet for a while now, and I can’t take credit for it or tell you who thought of it first. I liked it when I first saw it, and floated the idea by the family awhile back. This year we decided to try it out and put it into play. We are doing so partly because I think we all accept the fact that we don’t need a mountain of gifts under the tree, and also because we’re planning a couple of nice getaways in the coming months. My preference is to spend our few extra dollars on Doing Fun Things as opposed to Having Too Many Things.
I have avoided writing about the four gifts idea because there are many people who exchange fewer gifts out of necessity, and I don’t want to toot my own horn or be annoying about it. I’m writing about it today because of this blog post over at Globetrotting Mama. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. To summarize: Heather’s family hasn’t exchanged gifts for four years. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I know Heather personally and we went to school together.) Heather’s family is a travelling family. This is something I aspire to as well although we are not at a point in our lives where this can happen very easily. But, maybe some day we will.
So, yes. Four gifts. The girls made their wish lists awhile back. ONE of them helpfully divided her list up by category – Want, Need, Wear, Read – and the other didn’t bother, which left us guessing a bit. I will say it’s been tough to stick to the four gift rule because the temptation to pick things up on impulse is very strong. I did it, but I cheated a bit because I have a feeling the girls’ stockings will be overstuffed. The good news is that we’ve spent less on gifts this year and there’s less to wrap. What remains to be seen is how we feel on Christmas Day. Will it be sad to see less under the tree, especially after so many years of the volcano effect? (a.k.a the overflowing pile under the tree that spreads like lava beyond the borders of the tree skirt?) We’ll see, I guess.
