Don’t Buy Holiday Gifts for Toddlers
When you have young children, it can be tempting to go all out for the holidays, stuffing as many gifts as possible under the tree under the guise of making family memories (which they are unlikely to remember). But money is also finite; in fact, you may still be trying to get rid of your credit card debt after last year’s holidays. Fortunately, the great thing about young children is that they don’t really notice – or care – how much or how little they get.
One mom wrote to Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletari asking for advice on buying Christmas gifts for her large family and two children, and was also trying to pay off $ 62,000 of her credit card debt. One of Singletary’s suggestions for gifts for toddlers is the right decision: repackage the items they already have.
There is no need to buy anything for a toddler because he will probably be delighted with just opening the boxes. When my kids were tiny, I looked around for games, toys, and stuffed animals that they didn’t play with and that were buried in the bottom of their toy urns or hidden at the top of their toilets. I wrapped these items up and put them under the tree. Seriously, who remembers what they got at 2?
Donate your belongings again
She is right. At my son’s first birthday party, with a bunch of toys in front of him waiting to unfold, he only cared about the first card he tore out of the envelope. He loved this card. He would only be happy with this card.
Toddlers love the sound of ripping brown paper more than they care about what’s inside. So if on their last birthday they have a couple of extra toys that they haven’t played with yet, wrap them up and present them as new. Do you have several books that you haven’t read together for a long time? Wrap them up. They 1. don’t realize it or 2. take care. They are still ripping the paper.
Hey, do you know what else babies like? These are soft packets of fruits and vegetables. You buy them anyway; they are in your pantry now. Wrap up a few of their favorite flavors (or other snacks) and watch them enjoy themselves.
Wrap multiple pieces of one toy
Maybe you want to splurge on one big toy, but that amount is basically your entire holiday gift budget. If there are more than one, wrap each one separately.
A Fisher-Price farm , for example, costs less than $ 30 and includes a farm, bin silo, a farmer, and four animals. This is not one gift; these are seven things to unfold. And it is probably more interesting for a small child to discover a pig … then a cow … then a horse … imagine, anticipation, it is interesting that there will be an animal nearby!
Hit the dollar store
Your local dollar store has both holiday and seasonal toys, as well as at least one aisle dedicated to regular toys. In particular, you can find a wide variety of coloring pages, stickers, crayons, and other art supplies. Ten bucks at the dollar store can fill up the space under your tree nicely.
For older children
As they grow older, children begin to realize that the most exciting part of a gift is what’s inside the package, not the package itself. For this age, Singletary offers to make all the discoveries at once. You may only have a couple of things under the tree, but if you’re having a family reunion where the kids get a few more gifts, save the whole thing to open in one go. This will make the stack more impressive and distract attention from how many gifts you were able to buy.
One last tip for older kids from my childhood: bring stockings at the end. Year after year, my brother and I completely forgot about our stockings in excitement as we opened everything else. As soon as we thought we had discovered all this, someone will remember that we still have stockings and we will be in awe again. It’s not that there was ever more to them than candy, lip gloss, or a new bookmark; The point is, unwrapping every little piece prolongs the pleasure.