askchapo

This is how my culture does christmas: We start thinking about christmas in mid September. We make lists of all the people we have to buy gifts for and try to decide what to get them as well as starting to try to save a bit of money for the gifts.

By mid november we have still bought nothing and saved little to no money but we are starting to get anxious. We put up decorations and lights which is harder than we remember and costs more because most of the lights and decorations are broken.

By December 1st we are in debt and have maybe a quarter of the gifts purchased. We are very stressed. We are too busy finishing up end of year stuff at work, going to work christmas parties, and making a schedual for out holiday "break" to do any shopping until the last week before christmas.

We go shopping 5 of the 7 days before christmas and get gifts for everyone on the list. Most of the gifts are not really great gifts so we overspend our budget by 30% hoping that the expensiveness makes up for the lack of inspiration. We go to 2-5 family dinners with way too much food. We get a bunch of mediocre gifts that we don't want or need and maybe like one or two really thoughtful gifts that we were thinking of getting for ourselves on a boxing day sale.

3 times in the week after christmas we go return the gifts we got that we wont use and end up buying a bunch of things that we were hoping we'd get as gifts. This adds more debt meaning we will be paying it off till may.