The first year my husband and I were together, I remember going shopping for Christmas presents for just about everybody we knew.  Family, friends, coworkers… we did some serious shopping.  We did most of it at outlet stores and off-retail places, but we did a lot of shopping.  A few years later we hosted my husband’s parents for Christmas, and we had just bought our first home earlier that year.  So we put up a tree and strung lights all over our house, and bought lots of presents.  My husband told me later that he nearly fell off the two-story roof onto the picket fence below, so the next year we just put lights on our porch railing.  We’ve gradually been scaling down Christmas around here for the last several years, and it just keeps getting better and better.

This year, I made ornaments for our nieces (something I do every year, and our nieces really like their homemade ornaments).  I also made some blocks for a friend’s daughter, and a small scrapbook for my mother in law.  The week before Christmas we went to visit an elderly friend who is in a rehab facility following a broken hip.  We spend some time just sitting and talking with him, and it seemed to bring him a lot of happiness.  We put together a basket of food for him, including some homemade soup that we took to his house and stashed in the freezer so it would be there when he got out of the rehab facility.  On Christmas day, we went to my parents’ house for dinner with the whole family, and took along some homemade treats.

That’s all that we did for Christmas, and it was wonderful.  No decorations, no shopping, no hoping that UPS would get a last-minute gift somewhere on time.  No holiday craziness at all.  We opened our gifts from my husband’s parents on December 23rd (my brother and sister visited on the 24th, and we were at my parents’ on the 25th, so the 23rd made sense).  In true toddler fashion, our son enjoyed the wrapping paper most of all, and a pair of dad-sized gloves.

I know a lot of people get a bit bummed after Christmas is over.  It makes sense if you think about it… there’s so much build up and anticipation surrounding the holiday.  People shop for weeks (and months!), make all sorts of plans, wrap presents, count down the days of December… and then it’s over.  Advent calendars always seem a bit odd to me – aren’t the first 24 days of December just as good as the 25th?  Why would we want to bypass them and count them down?  It’s like wishing your life away with a fancy, decorated calendar.  And of course there’s the financial stress that so often comes after Christmas is over, when all the credit card bills roll in.

For us, Christmas was just like any other day, except we got to go have dinner with my parents and siblings.  We didn’t spend any more money in December than we do in any other month, and we didn’t have any holiday stress.  If you truly love the commercial celebration of Christmas, then by all means, have at it.  But so often I hear people talking about how much they hate the commercialization and stress that go along with Christmas.  If that’s the case, you don’t have to keep doing it the same way you’ve done it in the past.  Make the holidays a time to relax and enjoy your friends and family instead of a time to spend money and stress yourself out.  It can be done, and my own experience is that it’s a whole lot better this way.

I hope you’re all having a great holiday season, and that the things you do to celebrate truly bring you peace and joy.

I was walking home from the post office today when I spotted a huge dumpster out in front of a house, filled to the brim with what looked like a lot of wood and cardboard.  I had the dog on a leash and our son in the stroller, so I wasn’t in much of a position to dumpster dive at that point, but this evening I went back with my car.  I rang the doorbell and asked if I could take some of the wood; the lady said it was all going to the dump anyway, so I could have what I wanted.

I ended up with five pieces of wood, all about five feet long, 12 inches wide, and about half an inch thick.  They will be perfect for the shelves I want to build in the craftroom we’re going to make in our basement (currently the basement is unfinished, so it’s a blank slate as far as what we want down there).  Not only were they free, but I prevented the wood from ending up in the landfill.  That’s about as green as a building material can get.

There are a few nails sticking out of the boards, and some of them are a bit dirty.  But I’m planning to paint the shelves the same color as the walls, and I think they’ll end up looking great.  I also snagged a four foot section of thick wooden dowel.  I don’t have an immediate use for it, but I know that they are a bit pricey in the hardware store, and I couldn’t let it end up in the landfill.

Have you ever dumpster dived?  Did you ask permission, or just go for it?  Broad daylight or in the dark?  What did you find?  I recently borrowed this book from the library, and loved every page.  If you’re into dumpster diving or just curious, it’s a great read.

The last time I bought glasses – in 2001 – I think it cost me about $200 for the eye exam and the glasses. I only wear them when I drive or watch a movie, so they don’t get a lot of wear and tear.  But I could tell that the prescription wasn’t quite right anymore, so I spent $59 on an updated eye exam a few weeks ago.  Then I ordered my glasses online, and spent $28 for a sweet new pair of glasses with anti reflective coating and super stylish frames.  Twenty eight dollars.

I bought my glasses from Zenni Optical (and no, they aren’t paying me to write this).  My mother had tried them earlier this fall, and was very pleased with the results.  She wears bifocals, and got a new pair for $32 (compared with about $200 if she had bought them at her eye doctor’s office).  She was so happy with that pair that she decided to order another pair just for reading.  They arrived this week, but had been caught in a post office machine and smashed.  When my mother called Zenni Optical to see about a replacement pair, they offered to start making a new pair immediately, and within 24 hours she had received three emails from the company, detailing the status of her replacement order (and there is no charge for the new glasses).  So not only do they provide good glasses for rock bottom prices (as low as eight dollars a pair), but they also have great customer service.

My new glasses arrived today (not smashed!) and I love them.  At my current every-eight-years rate of replacement, the $200 that I would have spent on an exam and glasses will last me until I need bifocals of my own.

One thing to note, you’ll need to know the distance between your pupils in order to place an order online for glasses.  Eye doctors measure this distance, but often don’t write it on the prescription.  I didn’t find this out until after I had my exam, and sure enough, that space on my prescription form (listed as PD) was blank.  My husband measured it for me (the website gives detailed instructions for how to do this if you need to), and it worked out just fine.  But if you want to get an eye exam and then order your glasses online, it’s probably easiest to just ask the doctor to make sure that space is filled in on the prescription.

When we bought our new house, all of the window coverings were cheap plastic venetian blinds.  There was no covering at all on the kitchen window, but our neighbors gave us a blind that fit that window perfectly.   In the bedrooms, the plastic blinds provided privacy, but did little to block light from coming into the rooms.  Our son’s room is at the front of our house, and there’s a streetlight at the corner of our property that cast a good amount of light into his room all night long.  A few months ago, I sewed two dark sheets together to make a double layer curtain for his room, and it works amazingly well.  I spent six dollars on the sheets at the thrift store, and we found a curtain rod for three dollars – his room is now almost pitch black at night, for a total of nine dollars and about an hour spent sewing and mounting the curtain.

Our own bedroom has two windows, both of which also let in a good deal of light at night.  I went looking for a solution at the thrift store a few weeks ago, and found a really neat-looking comforter that was big enough to cover both windows.  I cut it in half, hemmed the cut edges, and viola – two light blocking, insulated curtains!  I spent $15 on the comforter, and it took me about an hour to make the finished curtains.

Window coverings can be very expensive, but they don’t have to be.  Look around for creative solutions – you might already have stuff on hand that can be made into curtains and curtain rods, and thrift stores are filled with blankets, comforters, and sheets that are much less expensive than similar amounts of fabric purchased from a craft store.

I just finished making our first holiday e-card, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.  We always send out photo cards, but the cost of postage and the cards, combined with the time I always spend addressing envelopes, made me decide to try an electronic version this year.  Nearly everyone we know is online these days.  We have just a handful of elderly friends and relatives who don’t use email, and for them I will still mail photos of our family.  But for everyone else, I created a digital scrapbook page with two photos, some simple text, and a few holiday-themed embellishments.

I’ve been scrapbooking since 2001, but had never tried digital scrapping.   So I turned to Google and found more information and free template downloads than I could ever use.  Nearly every digital scrapbooking site has free downloads that you can use, some are just there for the taking, some require that you sign up for their newsletter.  I made my layout as an 8.5 by 11 page, and it fills a computer screen nicely when the recipient opens it.

Zero time spent addressing envelopes, zero dollars spent on cards and postage, and a really cool-looking scrapbook page as our holiday card… what’s not to love?  If people want to hang our greeting on their wall for the holidays, they can easily print it out.  But I think most of us store our photos digitally these days, and our e-card will be easy for people to store with their digital images.

Anyone else going the electronic route when it comes to holiday cards?