While things are decidedly more comfortable for us financially these days, we’ve had many Christmases—both in childhood and as a married couple—when money was tight.
And yet we’ve always tried to make Christmas feel abundant. That perception hasn’t come primarily from how much we spent, but from how we approached the season and our budgetary restrictions.
I thought it would be good to have a go-to frugal ideas post for my Christmas archives. I’d love to crowdsource wisdom in the comments and add to this post over time! (Since it seems relevant to the topic at hand, here’s a post I wrote earlier in the month about Ten Frugal (Christmas) Things Lately.)
EXPERIENCES
Experiences don’t have to cost much—or anything at all.
One year, I gave the kids a homemade set of coupons (there are lots of free templates online). Coupons included:
- A doughnut date at a local (inexpensive) coffee shop
- A coupon for a full day off all chores
- A coupon to choose the family movie and the snack
- A coupon to choose one item at the grocery store (you can absolutely set a dollar limit)
- A living-room camp-in, complete with a tent and sleepover
Another year, we gifted the kids an at-home “restaurant” experience. I typed up a menu, lit candles, and served them dinner like they were at a real restaurant. The food wasn’t fancy, but they loved the novelty, and really appreciated being able to pick EXACTLY what they wanted.
Of course, some experiences do cost money: tickets to a theatre show, a flight to visit family, a gift card to a trampoline park. These aren’t necessarily inexpensive, but they tend to be meaningful and actually used—no clutter required.
If your holiday budget is feeling especially stretched and you have people who are looking for gift ideas, what about suggesting they buy the theatre tickets, museum membership, or magazine subscription for the year!
THRIFTED GIFTS
I mean… you knew this was bound to show up, right?
There are so many items in new or like-new condition at thrift stores. Buying second-hand is a wonderful way to give quality gifts at a fraction of the cost—and often with far more character than something brand-new.
(Here are all my posts that include the topic of thrifting!)
I made my first-ever purchase on eBay ahead of this Christmas; I was able to source a LEGO Star Wars set that’s not longer in active production for less than any other retail site!
BUY ITEMS ON SALE
If you’re not buying second-hand, try to shop sales whenever possible. I often pick up small items during the post-Christmas clearance and stash them away for the following year.
This is especially great for décor, wrapping paper, cards, and other holiday staples. Even practical things like Scotch tape can be deeply discounted—and tape, thankfully, does not expire.
For gifts, this can mean keeping a lookout for late-fall sales, including Black Friday/Cyber Monday and other cyclical events.
REGIFTING (WITH CARE)
Regifting can be controversial, and obviously it requires thought and tact. That said, I’ve received many items over the years that weren’t quite right for me but were perfect for someone else. Passing them along thoughtfully can be both frugal and generous.
BUY ITEMS THAT ARE NEEDED
It’s fun to fill stockings with surprises, but I also love including items people will use.
This year, I gave John some San Pellegrino—it’s something he enjoys but doesn’t regularly splurge on. I often buy Belle shampoo, sometimes a slightly nicer brand because, well, it’s Christmas. My parents usually give us soap and toothbrushes, which I am always happy to receive (every adult realizes that practical staples definitely add up!)
My dad always gives us a box of coffee filters in our stocking, which cracks me up—it’s another excuse to stop by for coffee.
Other practical-but-loved ideas:
- A holiday blend from your coffee-loving spouse’s favourite roaster
- Pens, notebooks, or stationery supplies
- Bath and body items: body wash, scrubs, lotions, loofahs, hand towels
- Socks in a fun colour or with funky patterns
Nothing here is revolutionary, just simple ways to streamline Christmas while keeping spending reasonable.
BUDGET FOR FOOD
Food can really add up this time of year.
I keep a master list of everything I need for holiday meals and baking and start watching for sales months in advance. Butter prices, for example, often spike near the holidays—so when it goes on sale in the fall, I stock up and freeze extra bricks. Same goes for brown sugar, chocolate chips, and graham cracker crumbs. I will always be making Unbaked Cherry Cheesecake, and I refuse to buy the cherry pie filling full price, so I have a note to keep my eyes open for sales by mid-November.
I make a seafood casserole every year that is… not cheap. But we watch for scallops, lobster, and shrimp to come on sale and buy them gradually, when they’re at lower prices, and store them in the freezer.
And perhaps most importantly: only make things people truly love. If no one eats the fruitcake, skip it. (I recently stood behind a woman at Bulk Barn buying fruitcake ingredients, and her total was over $200.)
Now I want your ideas for saving money (or simply making your use of money more effective) around the holidays!
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What really comes through here is how much thinking ahead matters. You don’t just spend less, you spend better. Watching for things over time and picking them up when you spot them (like butter, baking staples, or gift wrap months in advance) takes all the pressure out of a fixed deadline.
In Cape Town, I keep a cupboard where I stash things I’ve bought because they reminded me of a specific person. That way the gifts are more personal, properly thought through and often cheaper. And most importantly: no last-minute scrambling or overspending right before we head home!
I have a gift tote that I add things to all year when I spot items. Much cheaper and, like you said, less scrambling!
As you point out, Christmas IS a fixed deadline. I know 364 days in advance when it’s going to come 🙂
We love practical gifts in my household, so part of our gifting includes everyone’s favorite pens (wow, do tweens go through their own and “borrowed” pens, haha!) and things like that. I also love an experience gift but know time/scheduling is a challenge with friends so I use free passes from our local library to do a “time together” museum day where I drive, curate snacks and a playlist, etc. when it works for the giftee, which means I don’t eat the cost of “the day” suddenly doesn’t work.
Love all these ideas; free passes! I really should look into that with our local library.
I love your ideas, Elisabeth ☺️
All these Christmas recap posts make me ENORMOUSLY thankful that I have very few gifts to buy, and that I get very few gifts. My aversion to stuff continues to grow. (Pay no attention to the packages arriving from Lands End, LLBean and Coldwater Creek—everything is on sale, a gift for Husband’s upcoming b’day, and most looking ahead to next summer. OF COURSE I’ll have to send some of my other clothing away to a thrift shop to make space.)
Stuff management, gear management, space management is endless and exhausting. My feelings about it are exacerbated because I am about to begin year #3 of cleaning out accumulated junk at church. WHERE does this come from? WHY do people feel the need to keep so much stuff “Just in Case”. . . in case we want to recycle programs from 25 years ago?? STOP IT.
“Stuff management, gear management, space management.” Yes! One of the things I try to do before buying an item is:
1) Think of what I will be getting rid of to make space.
2) Decide where it will live.
If I don’t have a place for something to go, I shouldn’t bring it in the house!
Regifting gets a bad rap. I think it’s a really lovely idea – just because something isn’t for me doesn’t mean it’s not perfect for someone I know and love!
I agree! I’m happy to get something that works for me from someone who wasn’t able to use it!
for Josh’s birthday I got him Peanut Butter of the Month club!!!! It’s super practical (we all love PB) and it has DELIGHTED him. It wasn’t the world’s most frugal but definitely not wasteful or clutter producing as we’ve eaten every drop well in advance of each delivery so far. Ha.
I would LOVE this. Peanut Butter might be my favourite food group.
I think that sometimes the gift people will actually use (that might be more expensive at the outset) CAN be very frugal because it actually gets used!
I do the same thing with buying things in advance. It spreads the cost out as well, so your costs don’t spike in December.
One of my frugal wins this year was cheese fondue. We have cheese fondue for saint Nicolas, and you can buy it premade in store. But it has alcohol in it, and my kids really dislike the taste. So I got the ingredients, grated the cheese and made cheaper fondue muahaha.
I also love the coupon idea. Next year I’m going to add more coupons to our advent calendar. My husband was really annoyed at the amount of candy and chocolate in the house (too much! Not organised!) so this year I added 2 ‘eat whatever you want’ coupons, which they loved. They enjoyed pigging out and my husband felt peace return in our cupboard.
I bought a few things on clearance today that will go into my gift bin for various gifting needs over the next year!
Love the compromise on the coupon/candy situation!
The best way we save money is by no buying a lot of gifts. When possible, we like to employ a “don’t buy us anything and we won’t buy you anything” sort of policy. We used to do a sibling gift exchange but people mostly gifted gift cards so we said – enough, let’s stop doing this! We do buy my parents a sibling gift but asked them to stop shopping for us as they had enough shopping to do for the grandkids. I do not exchange gifts with my college friends for birthdays or Christmas either. Gifts are so so so so so so low on my love language list and I just do not need them! But obviously you can’t skip gifts for your children so that is where we focus our attention/dollars. But they get so much from extended family that we can get away with buying them fewer gifts than other families buy for their kids.
I wish I enjoyed gifts more honestly. It’s hard to kind of dislike presents during a holiday where gifts are so central to the celebration! I was glad my MIL only got me a gift certificate for a massage. Usually she will try to find other things for me and they are typically misses because I am hard to shop for…
Boy I am the most depressing commenter. Lol.
I think it’s great you don’t care about gifts. They bring me joy (to a certain extent), but they’re also stressful and expensive.
I really like that we don’t exchange outside of our immediate family/people who are with us. No siblings, no nieces/nephews. I give Joy a small gift, but that’s it for friends (for years my best friends from university used to send me things and vice versa and I am SO relieved we don’t do this any more).
Great ideas, all!
And . . . totally unrelated Elisabeth, but I have been lurking on your blog for a while now and have found the courage to ask: what are your beautiful floors? Are they real wood, Pergo-type, what??? I need to re-do my floors and luv, luv, love the look of yours!!!
Ha! My beautiful floors are very inexpensive laminate (we didn’t install them; the old home owners did but they are laminate!). I often loathe them because they show water spots LIKE CRAZY, but I have had so many compliments on them over the years so…I’ve come to like them more through other people’s eyes 😉
I only buy for 3 people so expenses are minimal. I like to buy and receive experiences and practical items. It’s great to have something that can be used later in the year to look forward to and is already paid for. With baking I pick items that have similar ingredients so I use what I buy all up and don’t have several half bags of items I forget about.
I really like the coupon idea you did for your children. I did something similar for my husband one year and we both enjoyed it.
Christmas doesn’t have to require a lot of money when you put a lot of thought into it.
I also like how experiences can be gifted at Christmas but enjoyed throughout the year (I love getting gift cards and using them throughout the year)!
Great ideas! I’m all about consumable gifts for myself and my family members. I always buy nice hand soaps and shower gels for my kids and we always make big baskets of specialty food items for them. The grands got fun toothbrushes in their stockings (Hot Wheels, Sesame Street,etc). Wishing you and yours a happy new year!
Nice soaps and gels are great ideas. And my family loves getting specialty food items, especially my husband. He loves having a fun/fresh variety.
Fun list!! I feel like I’m often flying by the seat of my pants sort of with gifts and every year I SWEAR I’m going to be more proactive, shop in advance, pick things up throughout the year, keep idea lists going as I hear of things…. next year. 😉 The most stressful part for me is usually coming up with ideas. It’s like sometimes I get a mental block!! When I see your posts they’re always full of such fun gift ideas, and I’m like, ooh why didn’t I think of THAT?! haha. Going out shopping in person actually helps me the most because then inevitably I “see things” and it can spark ideas, but depending on what else is going on, it’s not always easy to fit in as much as I’d like. I told Ivan next year I think we should block off a couple of in person shopping dates on the calendar way in advance (a la seasonal planning, perhaps??? ;)) because we often tend to think we’ll just wing it and then, shockingly, during the busy holiday season we don’t end up with many magic chunks of open time to shop. Who’d have thought! 😉
You always say this and then I see your gifts and you ARE AMAZING. That Pandora bracelet for your mom was perfect. And the gifts for your niece looked AMAZING. I think you undersell what a great job you do with gifts.
Sometimes the hardest thing can be coming up with ideas, for sure. I think that’s why I do enjoy perusing gift guides as it gives me some fresh things to consider.
aww, thanks friend. ☺️ You’re right- it usually always ends up working out in the end and I think I normally do end up coming up with nice gifts! On second thought, I think my issue is more so that I would like to accomplish that same end goal (nice, thoughtful gifts) but without some of the ‘panic shopping’ that I often seem to do. Example- that beautiful Pandora bracelet for my mom was an idea I finally had the week OF her birthday, and I just lucked out that Ivan was able to pick up the specific charms I wanted at a store near his work… it just as easily could have been that the ones I liked were “order online only” and then wouldn’t have arrived in time for her birthday celebration! I mean, I knew her birthday was Sept 12 the entire year… why couldn’t I address the gift sooner?! 😩 (The answer is I think that I tend to get caught up in the “now” – August had a vacation, back to school stuff, soccer, etc, so in my mind, the Sept birthday was something to worry about “later”….). I am really trying to lean into SHU’s planning methods again in 2026 (after reading BLP of course!) and want to get back to doing more formal seasonal/monthly planning! I used to do a lot more of that and it definitely helped bring things like this to mind sooner.
Planning in advance really makes a difference. The only problem is, my kids often don’t tell me very far in advance what they want for Christmas. This year I did keep a running list, so I had some ideas. I was able to get a few things on Black Friday sales, so that was good. Great idea to buy food items in advance when they’re on sale. Everything goes on sale at some point, and you know what you’re going to need.
I think it’s easy to forget how much food (often special things, too) need to be purchased over Christmas. By stocking up when things come on sale it can feel a bit less overwhelming in terms of logistics AND cash outlay.
I love all these frugal ideas. It shows that it doesn’t matter “how much something costs” but if it is something the recipient will love and enjoy. I think I want to take a page out of your book next year and do some “thrifting” for the holidays. ( I want to do more thrifting in general and it’s a goal for 2026. Yes, gasp!, I said goals… I think I might be setting some goals! LOL)
I really love the gift of “experiences”. Time together is so valuable and there are so many fun ideas that can ‘be gifted’. (Really cool idea to do a “restaurant experience at home” for the kids!) I am sure they’ll remember that much more than some of the “material” items later in life!
I am here for your thrifting goal!!! Can’t wait to follow along.
You could teach a masterclass in being frugal, Elisabeth! I love that you still aim for abundance, and that it is doable without spending a ton of money.
Ha. Not sure about that… but I do love frugal wins and I really enjoy making a spendy season a bit less spendy (without compromising the fun of giving gifts).
I’ve never eaten fruitcake. I honestly didn’t know people make it themselves AND eat it?
I always shop sales and look for coupons whenever I can. You are the most inspiring Thrifter I know!
I love giving usable gifts. My dear Uncle told me about ten years ago that he only wants Consumables for the rest of his days. Coffee, treats, wine, etc…and this makes so much sense and is pretty easy to do on my end.
Awww. That’s high praise!!!
I love consumables – giving and receiving them. There is something wonderful about actually using a gift and enjoying it in a tangible way.
This post is chockful of great ideas. I only buy clothes on sale. I like high end brands that I know will stand the test of time. I tend to buy stuff on sale and then have my men try on the pants, because they are super tall and pants nowadays might look like leggings depending on the fit and if I gift it to them and it’s on sale then the inventory might be nonexistent when they go back to exchange it. I take back what they don’t want in advance, which might not be a great thrifting plan – but it helps streamline the returns later. I love your coupon book idea. I’m big on gifting essentials, so the kids tend to get underwear and socks in their stockings.
I will admit I am not great about investing in quality, because I’m cheap… but that means I might buy MORE because I have to replace things more often. Where we live it is hard to get high-quality items (rural Nova Scotia), so that definitely impacts availability.