Making a List, Checking it Twice, Three Times

To borrow a phrase from the Occupy Wall Street movement, this question falls squarely into the problems of the “1 percent” category: When do you stop buying Christmas presents for your kids and declare an end to your holiday shopping?

Our children are still pretty small – Isaac is 19-months-old and Lucy will turn four next month – and their requests for Santa were pretty minimal this year. Shortly after , we told Lucy during a Cartoon Network commercial break targeting her that Santa has a lot of children to cover and therefore can’t bring everything on her list. That worked a little too well in that she wound up only asking Santa for one important gift out of fear that that one request might be ignored. And when it comes to her younger brother, Ike has yet to figure out why we have a seven-foot-tall fake tree in the living room, so his wishes are unknown at this point. All that said, my husband and I could really get away with buying next to nothing for the kids and they’d still be excited by whatever is under the tree on Christmas morning.

And yet we are still in the process of wrapping up our Christmas shopping for them with just a few days to go until the 25^th. I’m finding that this shopping thing is more about us than it is about them. It’s not like we are buying them huge items or spending thousands of dollars. It’s just that we keep spotting little things here and there that we know they will like.

It’s fun to buy things for them, but I wonder if we are spoiling them by indulging our own desire to make them happy. We’ll do all the things that really count and that are in the true spirit of the holiday that cost very little. For one thing, we’ll all be home together for a full week between and New Year’s, and I’m looking forward to a few unprogrammed days where we can play some of the new board games we’ve purchased or to go on local family outings (the annual train garden at the Shops at Kenilworth is high on the list). But fellow parents, I’m curious – how do you know when to say “when”? Do you set a dollar amount or shop with a certain number of unwrappables in mind and simply call it quits when you’ve reached that limit?