Monday, January 2, 2017

Beckee's deal with Christmas Presents

2016 was an eventful year for our family full of changes (the biggest of which was moving to Yakima). 

One of the changes that technically happened in 2015, but really made a difference in how 2016 went for us, was how we "do" Christmas in our house. Let me tell you a little about how we changed how we did Christmas. I posted a little about it in this post here. I'm going to steal a little from that post:
My husband and I coordinated with Santa last Christmas to do Christmas presents a little differently. Instead of lots of presents, we gave the family "adventures" that the kids wanted to do. For example, our 9-year-old is a huge sports fan and he wanted to see one of his two favorite players play live (Tom Brady or Stephen Curry). We found a Warriors game in January in Portland and took the family to see Stephen Curry play live! They opened an envelope with the tickets in them on Christmas. Our oldest daughter wanted to go see Wicked or another Broadway show. We could not find any Wicked shows coming nearby that we could make work, but Newsies was coming in April. So we got family tickets to that. Our oldest son wanted ski lessons from dad, so we arranged a ski weekend for the fam. AND all the kids wanted to go see the new Harry Potter land in California. So, we arranged to have that happen as well. ALL these experiences (that we likely would do anyway) doubled as Christmas presents. (YEAH! Pay once, get the excitement twice-once when you open the experience description and once when you use it)



I LOVED the whole "Pay once, get the excitement twice" thing. And to be honest, my husband and I want to travel a lot more. He has a job with quite a bit of time off each year, and he makes enough money for us to save up and travel. Even with 5 kids (which I know is expensive and sometimes really hard to do!). 

So, my "deal" with Christmas is that we are trying to have more adventures and buy less stuff. In another blog post I will tell you about the adventures of 2016 (the ones given as Christmas Presents in 2015). Then I will share about this years Christmas adventures and our plan for the upcoming year! Watch for those posts coming soon! 

Until then let me just wish you a VERY Happy New year! May 2017 be your best year yet!
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