Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year, right? Well, not for me, and perhaps not for a lot of parents. It’s almost here, and I’m stressed out! I feel like a lot of us are in the same boat. You want your kids to be happy, you want to get them exactly what they want, but you also know that it’s really hard and stressful to actually do this when you take into account the money, bills, and everything else that comes along with being an adult.

Setting gift expectations too high

My first big problem of this year is that my wife and I went way overboard last year. I don’t remember every gift, but there was an Xbox Series X, and Oculus Quest 2, various video games to go along with those, a nice keyboard, and a bunch of other items. From my point of view, there were several ‘big’ items, and now I fear that the kids expect it every year. How can we live up to that? How can I talk sense with a kid, and explain how expensive stuff is, and that we can’t just get every cool gift every year?

It’s a problem of our own making, and I’m trying to figure out how to ease out of it. Maybe this year is a little less, then next year is normal? This is a hard problem, because it’s not like a Series X comes out every year. Let’s say money was no object, I feel like I still wouldn’t know what to get them, or how to compare it to last year’s haul. At the root of this, I really don’t want to have one of those awkward Santa moments, where we come up with some terrible explanation about why he did better or worse than last year.

So many redundant unused gifts

Let’s be real, Christmas is filled with waste. I’m talking about all of those gifts you give that will just sit there, and not be used. There were materials, time, production, shipping and advertising put into these things. You bought it to hopefully boost a kid’s smile, but there’s a pretty decent chance it’ll just be in a corner with other junk gathering dust. I have this idyllic vision of the 1960’s, or earlier, where a kid gets a ball, and a little toy car, and it’s a done deal. He just had the best Christmas ever. Now, here we are throwing plastic and electronics at them, with less success. How’d we get here? Does it stop?

There are two examples from recent Christmasses which drive me crazy. In 2020, my wife got the kids these really cool mini drones. No remote, you just toss it in the air and it detects walls and flies around the room. We have three kids, so she got three of them. They were actually a pretty big hit, and got a lot of use for a few weeks. Maybe that’s fine for a gift that was like $15 each? Here’s where the story goes wrong. They inevitably got broken, or just forgotten about under a pile of other stuff. So in 2021, in an attempt to fluff out the gift pile, we got them almost the same drones again! This is the type of thing that makes me want to lose my mind. Same story, rinse and repeat, I’m not even sure where those things are right now.

The other example is related to remote control cars. I feel like my older kid is in that zone where he’s not as interested in the pure ‘toy’ things that his brothers are, but he still wants some of it to feel that little kid Christmas magic feeling. So last year, we got him a little RC car, because his brothers already had some. This was hinted at, by the way, we didn’t do it blindly. I swear to you, random internet strangers, I don’t even know if he’s used it for 20 minutes total since last year. Then this year, when compiling a list, he put an RC car down. Seriously, I wanted to scream. I told my wife I’m just refusing. I don’t think he knows what he wants, he’s just throwing random stuff on a list.

So, how do we deal with this gift situation anyway? 

As you may have gathered by now, I rarely have answers. I need to vent my stress, and this blog is my mechanism. This year is not going to be filled with big expensive game systems, but not because we have common sense and logic now. It’s because we already got the damn stuff! What I’d like to avoid is randomness. I want the kids to have fun, but actually get some meaningful stuff which makes sense for them. 

This is where it gets hard. Instead of listening to an advertisement, or grabbing stuff from an aisle because it’s flashy, we need to pay attention to our kids. If your reaction is “What?! Who wants that?”, I feel you. We all get annoyed and just want the gift buying to be over. What I mean is to sit back and reflect on the kids interests. We all move so fast, it’s hard to do that sometimes. I mean, really just think about the things they are normally into, and reflect on what kind of gift fits into that. Is it electronics, art, sports, clothes? They are all different individuals, so spending time on the thought will probably prevent us from spending money on more random filler gifts this year. This may all be aspirational, but let’s all give it a go and see what happens!