Today is supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year, trumping even Black Friday. I guess people are frantic as they realize they only have 48 hours until Christmas morning but still have presents to not only buy but wrap as well. Many probably have less than 48 hours to get these gifts purchased and placed under the tree as quite a few families celebrate Christmas Eve together. Or, as we do, some have a tradition of opening one select present on the night of Christmas Eve. Hence, the traffic today was absolutely horrific as we made our way to pick up a few items. No, we weren’t out getting last-minute presents. Our list included 99 cent pineapples at Aldi, a box of size 4 diapers (for Coralyn at night) and body wash at Wal-Mart, and finally $1 hot chocolate and $7 Folgers coffee at Hy-Vee. How could we pass up these great deals?! We braved the craziness and ventured out for the second time as an entire family since Kellah was born.
I am so glad that we weren’t rushing from store to store to find the perfect present for that hard-to-buy person. Don’t get me wrong; I do enjoy Christmas shopping and buying (or making) gifts for people in my family. I find joy in knowing the person will enjoy the gift and look forward to watching their reaction as they unwrap their presents. I especially get a thrill selecting items for Lawrence. However, this year we decided to do things a bit differently for Christmas.
We didn’t buy any gifts for each other, not even a simple stocking stuffer.
Things are financially tight at our house these days, and we couldn’t really justify spending money on presents for each other, especially when we have everything we truly need. Plus, we figured we got to celebrate Christmas about a week early when we “opened” the best present we could have ever gotten and welcomed Kellah Grace to our family!
Not having the money to buy gifts didn’t make us bitter. Quite the opposite. We were able to focus on what we already have and appreciate those things even more. We saved ourselves a lot of stress too!
Granted, we still “had” to do some Christmas shopping for our immediate families. Thankfully, Lawrence’s family draws names, so we can focus on just one person and getting that person exactly what they want/need. AND there is a set amount for how much to spend so you don’t have to break the bank (I was really excited to find out the amount had been cut in half from last year and that we wouldn’t have to completely rearrange our budget). I got to shop for Lawrence’s mom this year and had lots of fun getting the items on her list. Coralyn, of course, enjoyed helping me and would give me her opinion about what Grandmas Sherry would like best. :)
My parents understood our financial situation and didn’t make a big deal about presents this year either. We got them some picture frames and a photo calendar with a picture of Coralyn for each month. They gave us gift cards (Yay! Free/family nights), bought us groceries, and filled our Yukon up with gas! I am pretty sure we got the better end of the deal, as usual. When Kellah was born, they came to see their new granddaughter, and we just celebrated Christmas then. There was no big fuss over a fancy meal or a huge hurrah about unwrapping presents, but that didn’t matter. We were too busy ooing and aahing over a new baby anyway. We had a great time together and were so thankful for our newest addition to the family. I guess we did give my parents a new grandbaby, so maybe they got the better end of the deal after all. :)
And we did get Coralyn a few things so that she would have some presents to open on Christmas. Not that she needs anything. I think the gifts are more for our sake than hers anyway. The joy of a child and the sparkle in their eye on Christmas morning as they open up their gifts is something special, something we couldn’t do without – no matter how tight our budget may be. So, we were creative. Friends gave us a few clothing items and these absolutely adorable pink cowgirl boots. Rather than showing them to Coralyn immediately, I set them aside and saved them for Christmas. I am especially excited about the boots as Coralyn is in love with boots right now and will probably want to wear these cowgirl boots all.the.time. I did the same thing with some shoes that my parents (or Lawrence’s parents, I can’t really remember…all of her clothes and belongings come from one of them anyway) got for Coralyn that were too big for her earlier this year but will be a perfect fit now. They just happen to be Dora the Explorer shoes, and I can hardly wait to see Coralyn’s face when she opens that present as well (she loves Dora)! I found a felt bag with a snowman on it as I was wrapping Sherry’s presents and went searching through our stash of Christmas gift bags. Coralyn is all about purses, and filling them with as much stuff as she possibly can, so I figured this snowman bag would make a perfect gift. It could be her special Christmas purse! Then, a student gave Lawrence a present in a cute red felt bag, so I wrapped that right up and now Coralyn will have not one but TWO purses for the holiday (a girl can never have too many purses, right? :) ). I did actually spend some money on her gifts: I bought her 3 new “big girl” sippy cups (with straws!) from Target and was really excited to stack a store coupon and a manufacturer’s coupon to get $6 off the price. I also bought a notebook and decorated the cover. Coralyn will use this book kind of like a scrapbook to keep track of all we learn during our “school” time come January. Her final present, her “big ticket item,” was a pillow mattress I made for her with my mom’s help. She got to open this early though when she needed it when she went to our friend’s house while I was in labor with Kellah. Coralyn was pretty excited about her new bed and hasn’t slept on her actual toddler bed since Kellah arrived; she now sleeps on the floor on her pillow mattress every.single.night (and for nap time too). I would say it was a pretty good Christmas present! :)
All that to say, this Christmas is a bit different from previous years. And it’s been great, better than any Christmas I can remember. What could have been an extremely stressful time has been one of the most enjoyable times of the entire year. I do believe that not buying presents for each other has played a HUGE factor is this; however, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another, even bigger, reason for our stress-free holiday. In fact, this is the whole reason why I am writing this blog post in the first place (sorry it has taken me so long to get to the point…I never was one for short research papers in high school and college)!
I mentioned earlier that our stops today included Aldi, Wal-Mart, and Hy-Vee, but I left out one other place we visited– the bank. And amazingly we weren’t going there to take money out of our account. Instead, we were stopping by to deposit a check, a very “hefty” check we received in the mail yesterday from an anonymous friend. All I know about the giver (or givers) is that he/she/they are extremely generous!
Lawrence brought the mail in yesterday, and there were some nice Christmas cards, the grocery store ads, and of course the usual junk from credit card companies. I sorted out the pieces into piles (can you say OCD), read all the yearly updates from our friends, quickly perused the grocery ads (as we don’t really need anything this week since we have been blessed by friends bringing us meals every night since Kellah was born!), and was checking the junk mail to make sure I hadn’t overlooked a Christmas card or something of importance. Good thing too!
There in the “junk” pile was what I thought was a letter from some strange bank trying to get me to take advantage of low rates and change our mortgage over to them. Instead, I found a cashier’s check for $500 and a little note that read, “Congratulations on the birth of your daughter! Kellah is blessed to have parents who love each other and the Lord.” The only signature was the Bible verse Matthew 6:25-34. Like I said, I have absolutely no idea who sent the check or how they knew we could use the extra money. All I know is that God used them to bless us BIG time!
Earlier this month we were given another anonymous gift from some people at our church. This gift was timely to say the least as we needed to pay our midwife but didn’t have the funds to do so. Jeanne brought the envelope full of cash over to our house just hours before our scheduled prenatal appointment that afternoon! We were able to make a very large payment, which we later found out came at a perfect time for our midwife (so awesome how someone blessed us and with that blessing we were able to bless someone else).
If not for these two LARGE gifts, we would not have had enough money to pay for Kellah’s birth and all our regular bills, let alone purchase any gifts for our immediate families. We are so humbled to have received these gifts and can’t say thank you enough to those responsible for them, or to our God who yet again has blown our faces off as He reveals Himself as our Jehovah Jireh, meeting our needs in ways we never could have imagined on our own. Our financial situation could have been a huge source of stress for our family, especially at this time of year. BUT, God has made this Christmas different, and BETTER, than any other! Only by His continual faithfulness, abundant goodness, and marvelous grace we haven’t become overwhelmed with worry, fear, and doubt! He alone is the real reason why we have been able to enjoy a stress-free Christmas this year!
*I told saved the best part for last! Thanks for reading all the way through the post to get here! :)
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