My Christmas Top Tips

by Jessica Amey December 22, 2015

I can’t believe Christmas is in a few days, every year it feels like I have ages to sort everything out then before I know it I have no time left at all. I had to actually take the kids to the shop with me today to buy Cherry’s presents, to be honest she is so picky that it works well for her to show me what she wants and she seemed to buy the story that I am going to send them to Santa later. I still have to wrap everything too which is a job I don’t really like. We haven’t bought much for the kids, we never do really but they are very excited with the things they will be getting.

Here are some of my Christmas tips…

– Go to someone else’s house for Christmas dinner. Not only do you not have to do any cooking or cleaning but nor do you have to tackle the heaving supermarket aisles to buy all the food. Then you can give them some money towards it all or offer to bring certain parts like the alcohol, dessert or starter but it saves having to worry that’s a much easier option!

– Make your own gifts / crackers / snacks. I’ve made chocolate truffles before which were really easy, I put some in boxes and gave them to people as presents. Chocolate vodka is another easy gift, you just melt chocolate and add it to vodka then pour it into little bottles, if you google it then you will find recipes. I’m going to make Christmas crackers this year, the nice thing about making your own is you can make them really personal, almost like mini presents. I’m going to get Cherry to tell me some of her jokes and write those on a piece of paper to go inside and other little handmade things.

These DIY tea bags that I shared over on my craft blog would also make a great present along with a mug.

Buy second-hand. We are big fans of buying things second-hand, Tiger wanted a ‘giant car’ for Christmas this year and they are about a £100+ new but we found a used one on eBay for £40. He isn’t going to notice or care and it makes it far more affordable. I heard on the radio about people getting into debt due to spending too much on presents but it really doesn’t have to be that way.

Look out for sales. If you see things throughout the year in sales then buy them and put them back for Christmas, Sainsburys have a huge toy sale in November with nearly every toy being sold for half price, I always get so many bargains.

Enjoy it. This is quite an important one for me as I work from home and find it really hard to not spend all my spare minutes on my computer doing something productive but it’s nice in the build up to Christmas to just switch it off and go watch Christmas films without feeling like I should be doing something else. I’ve already seen Elf 3 times this week, it’s the best Xmas movie, apart from Home Alone but Cherry gets scared of cartoon films so I really don’t want her learning about burglars yet!

TSB have shared 12 Christmas tips all with little videos explaining them over on their website, here is one which I think is a great idea, I know we always have piles of drawings lying around. You could use masking tape to join lots together for the bigger presents too.

What’s your top Christmas tip?

Collaborative post.

Jessica Amey

Jess is an award winning blogger with a passion for crafting. She loves peppermint tea, cake, crochet, charity shops and all things vintage.

My Christmas Top Tips

A Guest Post For Joules

5 Ways To Tackle Those Early Mornings

You may also like