The Christmas Shopping Season is Upon Us

The season for shopping for Christmas gifts is now in full swing. Physical stores and online stores have been having sales since the day after Thanksgiving and many people are rushing to get their shopping done. Others already have most or all of their gifts purchased and ready for Christmas day. Likewise, there is a lot of variation in the method used to purchase gifts. Some people prefer shopping in physical stores and others do their shopping online at places like Amazon. Still others shop at both.

In our household, most of our shopping was done by the end of October and some of it was done online, while some of it was done in regular stores. In fact, some of the gifts were purchased in March. In our case, all of this makes sense. We have no major stores in town, so we either shop online or in the rare event that we travel 50-70 miles to a population center. Online makes the most sense because orders are either delivered to the post office or to our door if they are shipped via United Parcel or FedEx. As for when we purchase, it is better to buy early for us because my wife’s birthday is in November and we have the additional expense of two feasts, too (Thanksgiving and Christmas). If we waited until the last minute, we’d probably run out of funds. So we each have a Christmas “wish list” that we add to throughout the year. There are both inexpensive and more expensive gifts on those lists and we all know that few of the expensive gifts will be purchased.

For example, an expensive gift that I have on my list is a course at Tara Simon Studios, for singing, but it costs about $200, so I’m not likely to get it. Anything is possible, though, and last year, I got a guitar that cost about that same amount. A few years ago, I bought my wife a refrigerator and range. I got our daughter a $300 flute. Things aren’t always hard for us financially, so we sometimes have a little money to spare. Many gifts are cheap, though, relatively. My wife loves yarn, which isn’t tremendously expensive. Last year, she got about 20 skeins of yarn.

We got gifts this year for our daughter, though she won’t be here for Christmas and we can’t afford to ship them to Guatemala. Still, we have them for her. I got a Bible to ship to our daughter-in-law if I can figure out a way to ship it to Oregon.

We even get gifts for our pets. We occasionally get gifts for people who are alone or who are having even harder times than we are.

I know that the whole gift-giving thing is highly commercialized, but it is appropriate since God gave something infinitely more valuable than I can ever buy for anyone, and that is the whole point of Christmas. What God gave can’t be commercialized too much because of the value. Thus, I love giving gifts, especially those I know will be appreciated and used. It is just my wife and me this year, but we still have a lot of gifts.