A few days after Christmas, Sarah and I will usually head out to the store to stock up on post-Christmas sales. It’s often easy to find many items at bargain-basement prices in the days after Christmas – items which can easily be saved until next year.

We usually make a list of things to look for (as we do virtually every time we go shopping). I thought it might be worthwhile to share that list with you, to help you if you’re out and about the next few days and looking to shave some dollars off of next year’s Christmas budget (and maybe even net a few dollars right now).

Christmas lights If you need to replace some lights – or even just intend to hang more lights outdoors, as we do next year – now is the time to pick up Christmas lights, as many department stores deeply discount such lights. Even better, many energy companies will offer you a rebate for buying LED Christmas lights, so save your receipts and check with your energy company.

Wrapping paper and supplies Wrapping paper is an obvious thing that many people look for at after Christmas sales, but you can often find many other supplies on deep discount as well, such as gift wrapping tape and ribbon.

Cards We usually make our own Christmas cards (so if we see blank cards, we might pick them up), but for many people, Christmas cards can be a spectacular bargain right now as many stores are offloading them.

Non-perishable gift baskets Unsold gift baskets often go at a tremendous discount and if you can find ones that are non-perishable (like bath supplies and such), they can easily be stored for a year and given the following December. Many people often exchange such gift baskets with professional acquaintances and such, so this can be a tremendous savings. If you know you’ll be giving gift baskets of this kind for Christmas 2010, get them now and save yourself some cash.

Electronics – but only if you’re patient The Consumer Electronics Show takes place early each January. During that show, electronics companies unveil their product lines for the coming year and usually eliminate some product lines to replace them. Quite often, retailers know what lines are going to be cut and start trimming the prices on those lines to clear space for the new lines to be unveiled at CES. Thus, late December through January are great times to pick up home electronics.

Of course, you have to be careful with this type of sale. For starters, do not be afraid of the word “clearance” or other such words. Almost always, there’s nothing at all wrong with the model – it’s just being replaced by a different model in the coming year – one HDTV being replaced with a very similar HDTV with a higher price, for example. Also, different stores tend to handle such clearances differently, so you may want to simply shop around for a while to look for what you need. Don’t lock yourself into a particular brand or model – keep your eyes open. Write down clearance models, then research them at home.

Exercise equipment These items are usually on sale due to the upcoming New Year (and related New Year’s resolutions), but there are often spectacular bargains on basic exercise equipment in the week between Christmas and New Years.

The absolute most important thing to remember when considering sales is to focus only on stuff you actually need or have a direct use for. Buying things you don’t really want merely because they’re on sale is a sure way to put yourself in a worse financial position. If you’re intending to replace a flaky television, for example, now is the time to do it – but if you’re thinking of dumping thousands into upgrading your television by 4″, consider other uses for your money.

I hope that wherever you are and whatever you believe, good tidings are reaching you.

Tune in tomorrow for our regularly scheduled programming.

Melanie writes in:

Between the wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, tags, and other things, I’ve often spent $20-25 on just wrapping the gifts at Christmastime. This seems silly. How do you wrap presents? I’m sure you’ve got a less expensive way.

To me, the purpose of wrapping paper is simply to disguise gifts from the receiver while at least looking moderately visually interesting – nothing more, nothing less. I don’t see the purpose in spending lots of money on the “perfect” wrapping paper or on elegant ribbons when they’re going to wind up being a big pile of trash on Christmas morning.

Instead, here’s my Christmas wrapping strategy. All told, I’ll spend about $4 on materials and those materials will provide more than enough for several Christmases.

In the picture above, I’m about to wrap a copy of the video game Nintendogs for my eight year old niece (her parents might read The Simple Dollar, but I’m pretty sure she does not). I’m going to wrap it in plain brown paper, the type you would use for packaging things to mail via the Postal Service or UPS.

You can get an enormous roll of such paper for just a couple dollars. Even better, you can get brown paper at the store by requesting paper bags and trimming off the bottoms of the bags. Starting in about September, I start requesting such bags at the store so that I can give the bags a second life.

Here it is, all wrapped up. A little secret: I took pictures of several presents being wrapped and this one turned out the best – I’m not exactly a gift-wrapping expert, even though I’ve done it many times.

This looks fine, but it is a bit drab. Surely, there’s something we can do to color it up a little…

Yarn is what I use. You can buy an enormous amount of it for a very low price (the depicted roll cost less than a dollar) and it adds a certain homespun flair that just isn’t captured with ribbons.

It’s very easy to use yarn to add flair to your package.

To measure the length of yarn, I wrap it around the gift about three and a half full loops, or about seven times the average length of the package. It might be a little long, but you can trim off excess. I prefer to go longer than I need than to go too short.

After I cut off an appropriate length, I spread out the yarn in a straight line on the table, then set the package face-down in the middle of the piece of yarn. I pick up the two ends and…

… loop them together like so. Then, I turn the package over, tie a simple bow on the front (one that can be opened with a good tug, basically the same knot as is used to tie shoes), and I’m finished with the wrapping.

I like the big, floppy bow look – you may not. If you want a shorter bow, just tug on the ends of the bow until the loops are as short as you like, then trim the long ends. You could also use very long ends to make a lot of loops for a more decorative bow, if you’d like.

I personally really like the aesthetics. It calls to mind the old Rodgers and Hammerstiein tune … little brown packages tied up with string / these are a few of my favorite things.

What about the name?

I simply write it on the package in black marker, no fuss, no muss. You may also choose to write it on the back so the front looks undisturbed by the ink – whatever you’d like.

If you use paper bags from the store, the cost of such wrapping is approaching free – you’re using a tiny fractional amount of a roll of tape and of the yarn bundle and that’s all. Even if you’re using a roll of packaging paper, the cost is still far below what one might spend on typical wrapping paper.

Other ideas to consider:

Have grandchildren decorate packages for grandparents. Give them some markers and have them decorate such a package to their heart’s content.

Use the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper for children’s presents. Just save them for a few weeks and you’ll have plenty.

Print your own designs on the brown paper. Measure off a size that your printer can handle and print a design right on the brown paper. This works really well for smaller gifts.

Good luck!

Seth Godin pointed me towards this video of children opening Nintendo Wiis on Christmas morning (it’s well worth watching at least the first minute or so of the video):

Here’s the original page if you can’t see the embedded video.

While I was watching it, I was caught up with two strongly conflicting feelings.

At first, I felt happy for the children. Overjoyed children, on some level, always make me feel happy. I’m reminded of the unabashed joy of some of my own childhood moments, plus I can’t help but consider the happiness of my own children, too.

Yet, as I kept watching, the video began to unnerve me. These children were expressing an enormous amount of joy due to receiving an expensive consumer electronics item. I couldn’t help but think of Christmas 1987, where I reacted in a very similar way to receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System. It is still the single strongest memory I have of a childhood Christmas – and I remember the near ecstasy I had when my parents brought that item out of the bedroom.

What brought on such huge anticipation and excitement in a consumer product? For me, there were a lot of factors – friends at school were a big part of it, as were television commercials and, to a degree, my parents played along as well. They would encourage me to mark things that I wanted out of toy catalogues, for example, and I can remember drawing many, many circles around the Nintendo that year.

The end result? I spent more than a month in a fever pitch of anticipation about Christmas, hoping I would receive a particular item, and I was in an intensely excited frenzy when Christmas morning finally arrived. It was an emotional crescendo – and, frankly, it was the exact way that Nintendo’s marketing department hoped it would end, with a huge rush of happiness associated with that consumer product. Is it really a coincidence that our home currently has several Nintendo products in it? Likely not.

When I see those children in fits of ecstasy, I see children beginning to assign happiness to consumer goods – and that worries me. For most of my early adulthood, I did that very same thing – I convinced myself that my happiness was directly connected to what material items I had. I’d buy things and barely use them because of the rush of owning that product, and I’d quickly buy into marketing plans of all kinds. In some ways, I still do.

So this leaves the question: how can I tie together these scenes of Christmas delight with my own conflicting desires as a parent? Obviously, I want to create happy childhood memories for my kids and I also want them to actually have at least some of the things that they desire, but I also don’t want to create the type of emotional association with things that these kids are developing – and that I once developed. Here are my thoughts.

First, I won’t encourage my children to ask for anything for gifts. This discourages obsessing over Christmas lists and the like. Instead, I’ll just focus on paying attention to them – what are their interests? What are they passionate about? This requires more footwork, but it also stymies a focus on consumerism.

Next, I’ll work diligently to create positive memories with my child that aren’t associated with consumer products. Instead of leaving my children to their own ends – or spending time with them focused on consumerism – I’ll try hard to create happy memories that don’t revolve around things. I’m already actively doing this with my children – in just the last few days with my son, for example, he’s helped me make supper, we’ve played catch, we’ve wrestled in the living room until he’s laughing his head off, and we’ve also read a pile of library books together.

Finally, I want to reinforce in my children the power of giving over receiving. My childhood was often centered around the stuff I could get – there was very little focus on giving to others. We did not write thank you notes for gifts, nor was I ever really encouraged to think about giving to others, either in terms of charities or to loved ones for gift-giving occasions. I feel that this attitude contributed greatly to my financial problems in early adulthood, and I fully intend to work to implant different values in my own children.

I want my children to have a thoroughly happy and fulfilling childhood, but every time I watch that video, I feel that long term happiness is somehow being traded for the short term. That’s not a trade I want to make with my own children – there is a different way, and I intend to find it.

As you read this, my children are likely passed out on the floor from tearing open presents, emptying stockings on the floor, running around in a Christmas-induced sugar rush, and a big dinner with friends and family.

As for me, hopefully I’m taking a big Christmas nap in a comfortable spot somewhere.

Hope you have a very merry Christmas! Please share your favorite Christmas gift (either given or received) in the comments.

See you tomorrow!

Every year, the Christmas season brings forth a wide variety of feelings for me.

I’m flooded with memories from my childhood – time spent with relatives that are long since past, opening memorable gifts, and the annual centerpiece of a great Christmas meal. Those memories largely fill me with joy, but with just a hint of sadness from missing things that cannot be reclaimed.

I’m filled with happiness with the time I get to spend with my family. To me, that’s the real highlight of the season – the time spent with people I care about.

I’m often filled with stress, too. It often feels that the week around Christmas is filled with a lot of obligations – gift exchanges, lots of people to visit, long trips to spend a day or two with family. It’s actually much more difficult than it used to be, since we now have to bundle up our two kids for the trips and it often feels that we spend much of Christmas simply going from place to place, unpacking and packing, bundling up kids, and often leaving where we’re at just barely after we get there.

These elements mix together into a soup that can be very dangerous for my wallet. The mix of positive sentiment, a desire to spend time with family, and the stress of the season often results in little spending mistakes – ones that add up over the length of the season.

The end result of that? An unexpectedly large credit card bill in January.

Here are some tactics I use to avoid these ups and downs.

First, I make an effort to not overschedule things. It’s more important to me to spend quality time with the most important people than to merely touch base with a lot of people, many of whom aren’t quite as important to me. That means saying “no” to some holiday invitations, even if they sound enjoyable.

Second, I try to plan ahead as much as possible. We do things like remember healthy snacks for the car (meaning there’s a greatly reduced chance that we’ll stop for food on a car trip), pack a few small “extra” gifts (ones that we’d be okay with keeping, but they also keep us from making last minute emergency trips to the store to spend more than we should), and make sure we have an emergency kit for our car (enabling us to deal more cost-effectively with any emergencies).

Next, I recognize that I can’t solve family or personal problems with expensive gifts. Buying someone a great gift will put a smile on their face, but it won’t repair a broken relationship or mend fences. Those things take time, conversation, and understanding, not a show of material largesse. Instead, we’ve focused on good gifts that really match the recipient and clearly tell them that we care without diving into ostentatiousness.

Finally, I won’t turn down the generosity of family and friends. If a friend or family member invites us to stay with them, I’ll happily accept. If we’re invited to share a meal with someone important to us, we’ll break bread with them. I used to let pride stand in the way of such offers and often argue that I didn’t want to be a burden, but I came to realize that such offers are made because people want to share with you and help you, and it’s completely polite to accept what’s offered.

The Christmas season is about people, above all else, but that doesn’t mean that the holiday season makes it okay to mindlessly break out the cash or the plastic. Keep your wits about you, plan ahead, and this year you won’t be left with the big bill in January.

While I recuperate, I’ll be sprinkling in a few guest posts from some of my favorite personal finance bloggers. This is a guest post from J.D. Roth, who writes about smart personal finance at Get Rich Slowly.

Every year, people lament the commercialization of Christmas, yet few are willing to do anything about it. Christmas displays now appear in August. Black Friday’s mad rush only grows madder. But, as Trent has noted, gifts that matter don’t come from Wal-Mart.

Unplug the Christmas machine
My wife and I take pleasure in creating homemade Christmas gifts, as do many of our friends. But even these are secondary to the time we spend “playing Santa”, driving around making holiday deliveries to the people we know. As we chat on porches or sit in living rooms, sipping hot cocoa and fawning over children, it’s the bonds of friendship that are important — not the gifts.

In fact, I believe it’s rituals like our Christmas delivery that form the heart of a meaningful season. Traditions add layers of texture to your life which last not just during the holidays, but throughout the entire year.

My public library carries a great book about this subject, and I borrow it every year just before Thanksgiving. Unplug the Christmas Machine by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli urges readers to escape the commercialism of the holiday season, to make it a “joyful, stress-free” time for the family.

The four things children really want for Christmas
In a chapter entitled “The Four Things Children Really Want for Christmas”, the authors write:

As early as the age of four or five, [children] can lose the ability to be delighted by the sights and sounds of Christmas, only to gain a two-month-long obsession with brand-name toys. Suddenly, all they seem to care about is how many presents they will be getting and how many days are left until they unwrap them.

Many parents find it a challenge to create a simple value-centered Christmas in the midst of all the commercial pressure. But the task is made much easier when parents keep in mind the four things that children really want for Christmas.

Robinson and Staeheli argue that children don’t really want clothes and toys and games. The four things they actually want are:

1. A relaxed and loving time with the family. Children need relaxed attention. During the holidays, normal family routines are temporarily set aside for parties, shopping, and special events. It’s important to slow down and spend quality time with your kids.
2. Realistic expectations about gifts. Kids enjoy looking forward to gifts and then having their expectations met. The key is to manage their expectations. By educating them about what “Santa” can afford, and is willing to give, it’s possible to prevent disappointment on Christmas morning.
3. An evenly-paced holiday season. The modern Christmas season starts months before December 25th, when the first store displays go up. Things end with a bang on Christmas day. The authors suggest beginning the season late in the year instead. Get out the Christmas music on December 15th. Pick out a tree on the following weekend. Schedule some low-key family events during Christmas week. Stretch the season to New Years Day.
4. Reliable family traditions. When I talk to my friends about what Christmas was like when we were Children, it’s not the gifts that we remember. We recall the things we did as a family. I remember sleeping next to the tree every Christmas eve, but never being able to catch Santa in the act. I remember seeing the cousins. I remember decorating the trailer house. Your kids will remember the traditions, not the gifts.

That last point is so important: it’s the traditions that make this season special, not the gifts.

Holiday traditions
Lynnae from Being Frugal recently produced a video highlighting one of her family’s traditions. “To count down the days until Christmas, I wrap up 24 of our favorite Christmas storybooks…Every night before bed, my children get to pick out one book from the stack, and we’ll read it before bed.” It’s like an Advent calendar made up of books!

When I was a boy, one of my favorite traditions was listening to The Cinnamon Bear, an old-time radio program broadcast by a local station every evening at 7 p.m. This was a pre-bed ritual for years, and one I treasure to this day.

I know that toys and the games were important to me when I was a child. As an adult, however, the only present that I actually remember was my Evil Knievel Super Stunt Set. All of the other toys are forgotten. But the memories of cooking, cousins, and Christmas lights still remain.

Wherever you are and whatever you do this holiday season, I wish you the very best — Merry Christmas.

Many of you out there reading this are hurting.

The economic news is grim, and even though I believe the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, that doesn’t change the stark reality of things.

Most of us have lost a large swath of our retirement savings in the last year. My overall retirement savings has gone down about 30% over the past thirteen months, even with late 2007 and 2008 contributions.

Some of us have lost our jobs. I have at least three friends who have been downsized in the past calendar year.

All of us are uncertain right now – and that’s understandable. We’re looking towards living cheaper and letting go of the cultural trend towards overspending that has happened over the past several years.

Right now, many of us are looking forward to December – and to the holiday season – with some joy and some trepidation.

Can we afford to travel this year?

Can we afford to put a lot of Christmas presents under the tree – or should we?

Shouldn’t we scale back this year – big time?

Don’t worry. You’re not alone. I’m asking myself these same questions, as are millions of others out there.

But the answer to it is easy – and it’s right in front of our faces.

It’s easy to get caught up in the expenses of December – the parties, the presents, and the inevitable bills.

But that’s not what the holiday season is about.

It’s about time, not money. It’s about sitting around with your favorite loved ones, telling tall tales and playing games. It’s about the bright smile on your child’s face regardless of what’s under the tree. It’s about holding your grandmother’s hand and wishing her a merry Christmas, knowing that she’s been there for you over and over again throughout your life and also knowing that she might not be there forever.

So, yes, by all means be frugal this Christmas when it comes to your money. Cut back on the extravagant presents and focus on more thoughtful items. Tone down the scale of the parties – there’s no need to have a huge bacchanal this year.

But don’t cut down on the time. Savor every minute of it.

Because in the end, the time you spend with the people around you is the most valuable thing of all. No expensive present, no ostentatious party, nothing can compare to that time.

A less expensive present than usual is quickly forgotten. What’s remembered is the time spent together.

It may be a long December for some, but few things will make it better than focusing on what’s important and letting the rest drop off to the side.

And its been a long December and theres reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I cant remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
- Counting Crows, A Long December