Those of us who take our gift-giving exploits extremely seriously could perhaps do with the motivation and discipline to start planning for the gifts we want to buy well in advance, with up to a year in advance making for the best approach. The most significant reason for this is that of how items for sale which typically make for great gifts are available so much cheaper when they’re bought during a time at which they’re not typically sought as gifts.
Just to give you an example – one of those artificial Christmas trees some people put inside their houses during the festive season can double in price if you sought to buy one a couple of weeks before Christmas, whereas the “regular” price is available and therefore much lower when you buy one in the month of July or August. Not that an artificial Christmas tree makes for a typical gift – I’m just using it as an example to demonstrate the difference in the pricing associated with all things seasonal, including gifts and other memorabilia.
So what if you don’t quite have the discipline or perhaps even the time to plan for all the gifts you seek to buy well in advance?
You’ll have to find ways to stretch your dollars and make sure to cover everyone on your Christmas gifts list without breaking the bank, so everything has to be within whatever budget you have to work with.
It should be an experience
If you held a Christmas party which perhaps incorporates a Christmas lunch that follows a Christmas morning outing then you’re making your gift-giving ritual an experience instead of a focus on physical objects. Invite as many of your loved-ones over for the experience and you can stretch your dollars by catering to everybody at the same time.
A positive iteration of gifts that keep on giving
It could be appropriate to give people something tangible from the experience, such as personalized gift boxes or perhaps one or two pieces of what makes up a season’s greetings gift tower.
Time is the ultimate gift
Reading all of this might have made you wiser to something you perhaps always knew, which is that any gift you give someone is a representation of time in some or other way. How many hours of skilled labour went into the production of that $3,000 hand-crafted timepiece you bought for your significant other, for example? Knowledge of this often still proves not to be enough to overpower traditional thinking when it comes to coming up with Christmas gift ideas and gift ideas for other special occasions, with people seeking to associate the value of a gift with the amount of money it costs.
We should look beyond that thinking and go back to the idea that the purest manifestation of what time is, is indeed time itself.
Spend time with your loved ones during the festive season, enjoy the gift baskets you buy together, and that’ll make for the ultimate gift!
