It would be silly for me to recreate the wheel here for two reasons: #1 - I have no time (I still haven't blogged about things that happened almost a month ago!) and #2 - the mom/author of this post writes it way better than I ever could.
We plead with friends and family every year to scale waaaaay back on the actual gifts given to our kids. Not only are they typical privileged American kids who really don't NEED anything, but we don't want them to associate Christmas with presents, nor do we want them to associate some of the key people in their lives with 'stuff'. Instead, we love the idea of a well thought out gift; bonus points if it was handmade or it is the gift of time.
As I started talking to the kids about the holidays this week, we discussed gifts for Ruby. Of course both kids have a list of things they want to get her. Gold star for them because they talked about her and never once talked about what they want AND they both mentioned using their own money. Then we moved on to what we thought would be good gifts for other people in our lives....some random ideas got thrown around by the kids, none of them bad. I stressed to them the importance of putting some real thought into it, and reminded them that the gifts they make or spend time on are the ones their grandparents, friends, etc. will like best. Eli agreed, saying his favorite birthday gift was tickets to the Braves game with his dad. While that obviously cost money, the ticket was not what made it stick out in Eli's mind: the quality time with Lehr was key.
Hoping to continue this trend in our house and have it spread more through our family this year :)
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