Christmas comes only once a year and yet you can end up spending a small fortune celebrating it. It is all too easy to get carried away buying Christmas presents and stocking up the cupboards with food that won’t get eaten and buying enough booze to get everyone incredibly drunk. It is nice to let your hair down once in awhile, and Christmas provides you with such an opportunity, but Christmas can often end up being more of an inconvenience than a pleasurable experience, as you end up wasting more money than you actually have. You therefore end up in debt and stressed out as a result.
You don’t have to spend a fortune on gifts, but you end up doing so because you convince yourself that you have to. You don’t know how much the other person is spending on you and you don’t want to seem as though you’re being miserly, and so you end up spending more money on a gift that probably won’t be appreciated, anyway. This is why it is always better to ask someone what they want, as then you can’t go wrong; as long as they don’t ask for something incredibly expensive, but few people have the cheek to do that!
Presents are probably what people waste most of their money on at Christmas time, and it can be harder to restrain yourself if you have kids because they usually ask for more than they are going to get, and expect to come down on Christmas Day to a large heap of presents. It can be hard to say no to children since they are continually bombarded with advertisements telling them what the best toy to have is, something which is reinforced by their friends, and they aren’t aware of any pecuniary difficulties you may be experiencing.
As well as presents there is also the fact that you find yourself playing host to friends and family, thus putting pressure on you to put on a good spread. You end up buying a huge turkey, much bigger than it probably needs to be, as well as all the other foodstuffs that get consumed over Christmas. You buy nibbles and nuts, crisps and biscuits, and an assortment of cakes, so that you have more food than anyone could possibly consume in one day. You may also find yourself buying cans of lager and bottles of wine, even if nobody drinks very much.
You can easily find yourself spending more on Christmas celebrations than you’d planned to because it is hard to break free from the mentality that Christmas is a time for overindulgence and that money shouldn’t matter. However, if you don’t have a lot of money to throw around the expense of Christmas does matter, and it would therefore be helpful to resist the pressure to spend more money than you have during the festive period.