One of the greatest things about having children is the chance to relive the holidays through their eyes. Finally, you can experience the joy of toys; milk and cookies for Santa; overeating at the Christmas party and throwing up at your Grandma’s house… oh, wait, that wasn’t a good memory.

Last year our older son, Kyle, was one and a half and very observant about the world around him. We approached Christmas with glee, and eagerly anticipated his reaction to the giant mound of presents under the tree that morning. He toddled up to the pile, grabbed a present, and got really, really, REALLY excited!

…about the wrapping paper. In fact, he didn’t appreciate the presents at all. He wanted to play with all of the pretty bows and ribbons and paper. If he even looked at one of the gifts, he wanted to open the toy and play with it right then and there. He didn’t realize that the whole point was to tear through each gift and say, “What’s next?”

And even though that giant pile of gifts is what overwhelmed us last year, I have decided to turn it into an advantage. You see, I’m not the one who made the pile so big. It was my relatives, who live all over the country, who relished the idea of spoiling Kyle with presents from afar. We didn’t have Grandma’s house to visit after opening presents at home. All of the presents arrived here, and all went under the tree.

This year the same thing will happen again, and so I purposely am not buying presents for the kids myself. In fact, I am curtailing my gift purchasing overall, because I am at home caring for my children this year instead of working at a traditional (read paying job. I wondered how I would set a budget for this goal, and then it hit me. Literally.

I was doing laundry one day and in typical fashion I was trying to do ten things at once: sorting with one hand, drinking coffee with the other, keeping one ear out for Kid 1 and the other out for Kid 2. I found some change in my husband’s pocket (how do men always have change in their pockets even when they haven’t actually bought anything? It’s like the coins spontaneously appear in there. Anyway, I reached out to drop the coins in the “laundered money” can as I bent over to grab something else. The entire can dropped onto my head. Cursing and cleaning up coins, I decided it was time to visit the coin-sorting machine at the drugstore.

I rounded up the change from all points in the house (I spared the kids’ piggy banks and came up with $300! Right then and there I decided to use that money for Christmas presents. That way the holiday spending would not take a huge chunk of our savings like it did last year, and it might even go unnoticed by our bank account.

The word “budget” makes me laugh, because every time I have tried to make and stick to one in the past I have failed miserably. After we get through our mandatory monthly expenses, which are not necessarily fixed (whose cell phone bill is exactly the same every month?, there is little to no money left over for things like food and gas. If we just stayed home and didn’t eat for a few months, we’d be set. But with two kids who keep wanting food and need to be taken to the doctor, cutting those items out of the budget is tough.

Then there are the second-tier necessities, like satellite TV, internet and the like. When I was growing up we didn’t have those things, but that’s because they didn’t even exist back then. (I know, gasp, I am that old. But when I think about trying to live without these modern conveniences, I start to shake. This week our computer wasn’t functioning for about 12 hours and during every second of that time span I felt like I was on the brink of utter despair. And don’t even talk to me about living without “Dora the Explorer.” So, yeah, those things are staying.

With my $300 budget set up on an Excel spreadsheet, I planned out what gifts to give to which people. Two days later, I had exceeded the budget. After all, I do have several people on my list, and they don’t all want chocolate chip cookies for Christmas. Plus, I started early, and cookies will get stale.

I realized that maybe I set the bar a little low since I can’t exactly make homemade MP3 players out of pasta. The area where I’m saving the most money is on our own children. Because even though Kyle, at 2-and-half, is well aware that it’s Christmas, he doesn’t yet know that Christmas is all about presents and getting more and more stuff. In fact, since he’s still such a blank slate I consider it my duty to steer him away from the commercial, material emphasis on gifts and more toward the spirit of the holiday.

Many parents I know are very concerned about satisfying their children’s “needs” for lots of gifts from Santa. One friend’s son asked for “everything” this year. She clearly can’t get the kid “everything,” but she is going to do her best to make it look like all the presents in the world are under that tree, whether or not he’s been a good boy this year. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a watchful, all-knowing Santa? Bring back the practice of putting coal in a bad kid’s stocking, I say. That would be so much cheaper. Although with the price of fossil fuels skyrocketing by the minute, maybe that isn’t such a cost effective route.

No, I think what I’ll do is tell Kyle that Santa brings some presents to good girls and boys. I won’t tell him that the presents from Santa are actually ones sent by Grandma and Grandpa with the gift tags removed and placed by me near Santa’s sooty footsteps. No, that will be our secret. And this way, there will be enough money left over for a trip to the store for a great Christmas dinner.

– Kim Tracy Prince

Kim is the loving mother of a very energetic toddler and newborn baby boy. She has worked on the hit show, “Bringing Home Baby.” Have a comment for our very blunt Mama? kim@themommytimes.com Check out Kim’s blog: www.houseofprince.blogspot.com