The Importance of Sharing Christmas Traditions With our Families
Since Christmas is near I thought I would stray off the frugal track just a bit and talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. While the idea of Christmas Traditions is in fact centuries old, it is an idea that has been growing in popularity lately as more families seek ways to connect and bring meaning to their Christmas.
For those on a budget or seeking to avoiding keep up with the Jones’s, building Christmas traditions can be a great way to take the focus off material things and put it on traditions that can offer something far more permanent than expensive gifts and rich foods.
Christmas traditions offer memories that will be held dear and passed on from one generation to another generation and offer you and your family the opportunity to build something more out of Christmas.
While there are many old time honored traditions that surround Christmas you can use any of these or your can make your own, there really is no limit to the traditions that you create, simply that you do them each year.
For some it may be volunteering to help with dinner at the
shelter, or putting gifts under the giving tree. Others may keep it closer to home and traditions may center on putting up the tree, or string popcorn to hang up. For some a trip around town to see all the Christmas lights and stopping for hot cocoa may be the tradition they remember into adulthood and share with their kids.
I remember as a child listening to first Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas record as we decorated the Christmas tree, making Christmas cookies, and waking up our parents when it was still dark out.
As my children grew up we had many traditions between giving back to the community, helping children less fortunate, and our homebound traditions of putting up the tree on the Friday after Thanksgiving, making candy and a homemade stocking for each person in the family.
As time has gone on we have added traditions to these, these traditions came as our oldest children began to grow up and our youngest child came along, one year we decided to do Christmas dinner on Christmas eve and do leftover’s and cold cuts on Christmas day. It was our last Christmas with the oldest kids and we wanted to spend the day with them not in the kitchen!! We decided we liked that arrangement so much it has become our tradition for every year since then.
We go to see the lights at the amusement park every year even though they rarely change, but out of that I have the picture of my daughters last visit to see Santa.
Traditions serve to ground us, bring us closer to our family, and closer to the holidays and our purpose in celebrating them.
Spending a lot of money on the holidays is often an attempt at creating memories when memories cannot be created by material things, when the thing is gone, often so too is the memory. Traditions are the memories that we seek, family ties and closeness is what we crave. So put down the Credit card and pick up the music CD or popcorn and get started creating memories!!
If you have traditions you would like to share please take the time to leave a comment and let us know!!
Give the Gift of Love – Treat your Kids to a Pajama Party
In a time and season where giving gifts is all to often the theme, finding a way to get past the materialism and realize what really matters can be just the thing your family needs.
What is better than finding a way to reconnect with family and give a gift that does not have to cost anything? For the ultimate in frugality a pajama party is a gift that your family will ask for again and again.
We came up with this idea this past fall when we found we were spending too much time working on building our business and not enough time spending time with our nine year old daughter. Since we came up with this idea she has asked for us to repeat it several times.
You can spend as little or as much on your pajama party as you want, while this gift can be completely frugal you can spend a bit of money on it, to give you something to wrap up under the tree.
A pajama party is very flexible, for us it lasted the night and part of the morning, you can also choose to get up in the morning and spend the entire day playing with your kids in your pajamas. While you may think this sounds like a lot of time if you are very busy, this time is well invested and your kids will not soon forget it.
Here is what we did: We purchased new sets of pajamas, something we needed anyway, and when our daughter came home from school Friday night we met her in our pajamas and announced that we were having a pajama party. We filled the coffee cups with hot cocoa and sat down to play board games. We ate a snack dinner of cheese, meat, crackers and dip veggies.
We rented several movies and sat on the bed with popcorn, and watched movies late into the night. Then we got up when we felt like it, had a special breakfast and played more games. There were no distractions, we turned off our cell phones, turned off our computers, and focused on nothing but our family for the entire time.
You can do a pajama party without spending any money at all, you simply adapt your party to your budget, use the pajamas you already have (we needed pajamas anyway and it was the perfect time to get them) make up a special feast of what you already have in the house, and get movies from the library.
Add a few board games, some coloring pages and a deck of cards and your child will have an evening they will not soon forget.
This makes a perfect gift to give your child for Christmas and I
am more than certain they will appreciate it just as much as the new video game or Barbie doll. What’s is even more important is they will remember it long after the Barbie and video game have been forgotten.
I know we plan to do this again during Christmas break with our daughter, she has asked for it, and we are going to make sure we fit it in. We are often very busy, and this gives us a special way to reconnect and let our child know how much we love her. The message is not lost, she very much understands and appreciates the time we take to do this for her and for that matter for ourselves.
Yes you see something unintended came out of our Pajama party, we went back to our work feeling refreshed and happier ourselves. The pajama weekend was it seemed not just for our daughter but for ourselves as well. Re-energized we felt like we had spent a weekend getting away, we laughed, we played, we acted like kids, and it left us relaxed and clear headed by the end of our party and ready to face the world again.
A SAHMs Honest Guide to Getting Started with Making Extra Money Online
This is part one in a series about getting started on making money on the Internet. Stay tuned in the next few days for Part 2!
Making money online is a topic many People ponder on. It has been an increasingly important question faced by stay at home moms as the desire to stay home with their children wars with the need to bring extra income into the home. Rising prices at the grocery store and skyrocketing energy costs are making it harder than ever for mom to make that decision.
So instead of going out and looking for a job, many moms are heading to the internet in the effort to find ways to earn the extra cash needed to make ends meet.
The problem is that most of these people have no idea how to do this or when they find something that interests them they try it for a bit of time and when it does not work they quit, thinking that they just do not have what it takes.
The other problem that faces many moms searching for a way to make money is that there are too many people that are either out there to rip them off or the programs cost money with no way of knowing whether the cost is worth the product you get.
You do not need to spend money to get started with making money, there are a number of resources out there that are free that will show you how to do this. As time goes on you may decided you do need to spend money to increase your knowledge, that is ok though because by this time you will have the knowledge and resources you need to know what products will answer the questions you most need answered.
OK So How Do I Do It?
Making money online can really be broken down into two categories:
Building – both your own websites and helping others build theirs. You can bet that if you are looking to build websites to make money there are lots of people out there trying to do the same. This can included writing, graphics, web design, blogging and much much more. More about this later.
Marketing – This is a wide category that involves many different things, you can market your own product which can be anything from crafts to an eBook. You can market other people’s products this is called affiliate marketing and it is a huge multi million dollar business that is still not even close to saturated. Or you can sell, either through drop shipping or eBaying your own things or those you find in your community.
This is only just the beginning
I did a post some months back about different ways to make extra money, but I think I am going make this into a series of articles that goes more into depth about many of the different ways to make money and some of the free resources available to learn about them. There is just too much information to put in one blog post. So stay tuned as we explore the basics of earning money on the Internet.
Before I finish this post however there is one more important thing you should know.
The Only Things you Need to Succeed
By now I imagine many of you are saying that you do not know how to do any of that and that you do not have the talents and skills to accomplish the things I have mentioned.
My response is that if you knew the number of moms, dads and kids that are out there making a full time income or more that had no skills or special talents to bring into their business you would be asking instead “why am I not out there doing this?”.
Then of course you would cite the grim statistics about how many people fail trying to start an Internet business. Guess what? Those people that fail at their business did not read the above!! when things did not go their way they quit thinking that somehow they did not have what it took to succeed.
Here is What you Need -
Persistence – Never never give up, if something is not working for you there are three approaches you should take.
1) Keep Trying – while you keep reading trying to figure out what more you may need to do or what you might be doing wrong. Most times you may just lack the knowledge that you need to be effective, keep at it and keep learning you will figure it out.
2) Be Flexible – If things are not working right – be willing to change your approach multiple times till you find what does work. Try a new product or makes tweaks to the old one, you will eventually find the approach that works for you. Do not mistake this for not staying focused though, if you are trying a certain discipline for marketing for instance stick with the discipline until you have very good reason to change. Learn all you can about it, and make your tweaks with in that focus. If you bounce your focus all over the place you will never learn enough about anything to make it work.
3) Be Open to Opportunity – While staying focused is a good thing, you should always keep yourself open to opportunity. It may come in the form of a niche product that ends up selling extremely well, or in an entirely different way to make money that you stumble across by accident. For many people this is how their fortunes are made by inadvertently stumbling across an opportunity and being savvy enough to snap up on it and make it work for them.
Above all do not give up, be persistent and stay committed, if you do these three things it will not be a matter if you are lucky enough or if you are talented enough, it will only be a matter of when things all fall into place in the right order for you. It may take 2 weeks or it may take 2 years, but it will happen if you work hard and stay focused on the goal.
Taking a Fall Pantry Inventory
With Fall upon us and winter quickly approaching it is time to take stock of our pantry’s. This year promises to be a rough year for some, and with that in mind it is time to make sure that we have an adequate pantry to suit our needs.
Make a List
Start by making a list of what you would like to have in your pantry if you do not already have one. If you are not sure what to put on your list there are several sites around the internet that keep excellent pantry lists that you can simply personalize for your needs.
A couple of excellent sites with lists to check out are
These should give you an excellent idea of how to start your list and what you might want to put on it. Be sure to think of items your family uses a lot as well as items you can use to make meals in a pinch.
The objective here is to make sure that you have enough food to last you through any difficult times and at the same time allow you the luxury of only buying items on sale. By shopping this way you can save money but you can also have a stockpile that can see you through if energy costs become to high, or someone ends up without a job.
Stocking Your Pantry
Once you have your list, set aside money each payday that can be used to complete your pantry. If you do not have much to spend that is ok, you can buy a lot of staples for not very much money.
Make sure to buy the essentials first, coffee may seem important at first, but making sure you have staples such as rice, beans, flour and vegetables can make sure that your family stays fed even in the leanest of times.
Shop the Sales
If you have more money to spend, then look for items as they go on sale, try to find coupons for these items to further reduce their price. By buying items for your pantry only when they are on sales you maximize your food dollars.
Because it is fall concentrate on the types of foods you will eat in the winter, stock up on beans,canned vegetables and other things you will use to make soups. Purchase oatmeal which is both economical and filling for breakfasts on cold winter mornings.
Planning for Emergencies
Planning for emergencies, power outages, storms, and the unexpected can take a lot of the stress out of your world.
Aim to have between one to three months worth of food stockpiled. This can take care of most emergencies, tide you over when bills get high and allow you to be careful about what you spend on food in the winter.
Label that Stash!
If you are a seasoned canner/preserver then this information may be obvious, but if not, read on. While some people label everything, I am not one of them. Some things need labels though & home-preserved food is high on that list! What do you put on the label? Well, for starters what is in the jar or container & the date you put it up. Now you know what you are about to eat & if it is safe. What else is there? I use batch numbers. This takes up very little room, isn’t much work & can be invaluable.
For example, lets say you put up a few small batches of jam, and one batch, while tasting fine, was a little jiggly (sorry for the technical jargon LOL). With batch numbers you can avoid giving out this jam as gifts. Don’t give your canning away? Another example…you have canned lots of pickles & all turned out well. In a few months you notice a few lids were now ‘unpopped’. If you are worried & have the batch # you can toss just what you need to & nothing more. Make salsa? My hubby gets a little liberal with the spices as we go, so having a batch number lets me know if I can serve a jar to guests, or if I will send them running from the house!
Labeling doesn’t need to be a lot of work. I just put up some corn for the freezer. The labels say corn-3 9/09. I will notate in my canning notebook that batch 3 was a litte starchier. Now when I want to make a casserole or soup I will grab that corn. Try it & I’ll bet you find it easy & helpful.
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