The expenses for holidays and birthdays can be very high. Per www.foxbusiness.com, the average American spends $1,000-$2,000 on holiday gifts, with one-third of it being for Christmas. This can be an incredible drain on your expenses and a true hit to the budget, especially if you have a large family. If your money is tight, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have these experiences, it just means that you have to be smarter about it.
In the blog Gift Giving Hacks on 4/15/21, I talked about re-gifting, making your own gifts, reducing the amount of people you are purchasing for, and generally cutting back on the amount spent on each individual. Besides gifts, there are other ways to earn money for your family. https://realpamelaferguson.wixsite.com/website/post/gift-giving-hacks
Gathering with Friends
For holidays and birthdays, it’s wonderful to spend time with friends and family. It’s nice to have people gathering together for food and relaxation. However, catered or purchased food is very expensive. Depending on the type of event, consider asking attendees or relatives to help out. Instead of shelling out money to purchase the food, a pot luck can be nice to get everyone’s specialty dishes. Instead of going out to dinner once a month with your friends for a night away from the kids (this can definitely be considered a holiday), stay in at one person’s house and have everyone bring a dish to pass. You still get to be together and share great food. If there are a lot of kids, you can hire a babysitter (or older sibling) to watch all of them together while the adults get to spend some quality time on their own.
Birthday Parties
If you’re hosting a birthday party, try planning it at a time where food is not usually offered. A 2:00 pm party time where only cake and ice cream are offered is perfectly acceptable. People would have already eaten lunch at this time so a large spread of food will not be expected. If you feel you need to put out something, simple items like cheese and crackers or veggies and dip work great. If you do choose to serve a meal, do something easy like hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill with fresh fruit, raw vegetables, and potato salad. Simple and reasonably priced.
I know that birthdays nowadays (especially children’s) have gotten out of control with the spending and all that you see at the party. This can include bounce houses, hired characters, catering, petting zoos, and such. These things, however nice, are not mandatory for a child to have a fun time at the party. Are they necessities? No! They’re fun, but not a necessity. Low key parties and celebrations can be just as fun, without overspending.
Cakes for celebrations can be very extravagant and expensive. All children are happy to have cake whether it’s from your kitchen or the best and most expensive baker in the city. Mostly, cake is cake to a child. You can purchase a cake mix for $1.99 (or less) at the grocery store and frosting for a similar price and have a tasty cake. That’s a $4 cake that the kids will be perfectly happy with. You can go online to find plenty of creative ideas for fancy cakes where you can make them into shapes or stack them. You CAN actually do this. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You’ll take one picture and then it will be demolished.
I have made many of the cakes for my children over the years. I’ve made standard cakes, princess cakes, Nemo cakes, and even ice cream cakes. These are things that you can do in your own kitchen with minimal expense and an average amount of time. I also discovered that making cupcakes and letting the children decorate them is a lot of fun for the kids and also counts as a fun activity where they can put whatever toppings they want on it. An option like this is very easy to do and requires little planning and preparation. Here’s a link to my Pinterest page for some party and cake ideas.
You can host a reasonably priced party at your home. It’s becoming more common for parties to be held and private venues like swimming pools, jumping places, or gymnasium facilities, but I think your own home is always nice, easy, and simple. Keeping the guest list reasonable will help keep your costs down as well. Don’t feel that you need to invite everyone in your child’s class to your party. Set a budget and don’t go over it. If your child is old enough, have them help with the planning. If they insist on a specific item that they must have for the party, let them know that you’ll have to make concessions in other areas. This will teach them responsibility with money and that money is not an endless pit. For example, if your budget is $100 and they want a $40 cake, let them know they won’t be able to have the gift bag with all of the favors in it or the piñata.
Gift bags are fairly common for birthday parties. I’m not sure why we feel that a person attending a birthday party, having fun, cake, and ice cream (and even food on some occasions) need a goody bag for coming. However, I do understand this is a standard in many places and believe there are very viable solutions to the goody bag expenses. First of all, most “goody” bags are a bunch of small junk toys that your child is not that interested in and you don’t want all over the house anyway. Some other options for gift bags include…
· Crossword puzzles, hangman, tic tac toe, clocks for telling time can be found online for free. You can even customize the crossword puzzles with things specific to the party like your child’s name, the birth month and day, their favorite color or animal. It’s pretty awesome. Some good websites are: http://www.superkids.com, http://www.edhelper.com/, http://www.cufatcats.org/FunStuff.html, http://www.moneyandstuff.info/, and http://www.usmint.gov/Kids/games/. There are tons of other websites out there as well. You could lose yourself in an afternoon with these sites alone.
· Pictures of the children during the party. Take photos during the party and print them. Put peel and stick magnets on the back (can be purchased at any craft store/online/Walmart). The children can see themselves at the party. A group photo would also work well. You can also buy a mini printer specifically for phone pics that is stick on the back http://bit.ly/miniprintertarget
· Small items from the dollar store. You want to choose items that will be used like coloring books, crayons, or pool toys.
· Craft made at the party. Instead of a goody bag, you can choose to make and take a craft. For example, for one party, I bought t-shirts at Wal-Mart for $3 each. I put the names on the sleeves so there would be no confusion. I had the children pick leaves out of our yard. Each child put one or more leaves on their own shirt. We laid them all out and I sprayed some bleach over the leaves. You then remove the leaves and soak them in water to neutralize the bleach. We sent the shirts home in a grocery bag where they could be washed by the parents and worn many times over. This was a perfect craft for 3-year olds since it had minimal involvement from them, but they went home with something that they customized.
All of these items are things that will not be thrown away and can be used for a while after the party and are all reasonably priced or even free, which is a bonus if you want to keep your costs low.
Decorations
Instead of paying money for decorations for a party or holiday, make your own—or have your kids do it. A cute option is to use your kid’s artwork to put up around the party. They will love it and so will their friends. What about displaying pictures of the child over the ages? You could put them on a poster board. Even though my kids are all now teenagers, I have kept a lot of the school holiday artwork (St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day) that the kids bring home from school over the years. Prior to each holiday, I put them up around the house. They get a kick out of guessing which one of them did which project and it makes them happy to see it displayed.
Halloween
Anyone that knows me knows that I love Halloween. I like to go all out and get great costumes and enjoy the season. Because of that fact, I could easily spend way too much money on costumes and decorations. Since my children were born, I have started making their costumes (and my own). Depending on what you want to make and how much you’re paying for the fabric, this could save you a considerable amount of money. There are very simple costumes that you can make with things that you have around the house. One year my oldest daughter went as a lemonade stand. I used a cardboard box, wrapping paper rolls, yellow yarn, a plastic glass and pitcher, and some elastic. The only thing that I had to purchase was the plastic pitcher which I found for $.99 at Target. The costume came together wonderfully and was very original too. She loved all of the attention that she got and even ended up winning a costume contest. Specific to Halloween costumes, it’s the original ones that you can make at home that are the most memorable anyway. Save yourself a lot of money by planning early and thinking of things that you can do from your own home. Check out my Pinterest page to view my homemade costumes over the years. https://www.pinterest.com/realpamelaferguson/homemade-halloween-costumes/
You may host a lot of parties over a lifetime and the expenses can rack up. If you’re looking for ways to cut back, this is a place that you can do it. You can do this without sacrificing your bank or not allowing yourself to have the experience at all. For additional information, check out Hacks for Child Birthdays and Holidays on 4/17/21 for even more savings and ideas. https://realpamelaferguson.wixsite.com/website/post/hacks-for-child-birthdays-and-holidays
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