Nov 23 - Holiday Shopping

I am slowly starting to chip away at Christmas, one lunch hour at a time. It's so much easier to get my Christmas shopping done this way than having the pressure of going out once or twice and feeling like I have to get it all done in that tiny window of time. This gives me more time to spread it around, and also more time to shop around and find what I have in mind for people.

Right now my life is being ruled by a single little notepad that is tucked into my purse. What it is critical on that notepad that I would be lost without it?

The front page: List of what I wanted to get accomplished this week. Random things I needed from an assortment of stores, random Christmas gifts I wanted to get picked up this week. Movie times for Thanksgiving day to take the kids to go see the Muppets, stuff like that.

Store Pages for Black Friday: I hit up http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com to find all the ads early and start my planning ahead of time. I wanted to make sure I was looking them over carefully and not missing anything and that I had a good plan well in advance. Since Walmart is price matching this year on pretty much everything, I will be spending most of my time there instead of just going store to store for 1 or 2 things.

Holiday Schedule: Matt and I had to coordinate our work schedules, our day off schedules, the kids school schedules, and our family holiday schedules to figure out where we are going to be pretty much every day between December 19 and January 2.

Our plans are to spend a couple of days in the Detroit area visiting my family over Christmas, so I did a quick check to see what that was going to set us back and was very happy to see I had quite a few points saved up towards rooms at the Holiday Inn. For 2 days during the holidays we're only going to pay $80 for our room, so I thought that was pretty reasonable. I booked the rooms today and even had a hard time finding hotel rooms that were open! So clearly I am not the only person thinking ahead.

As I am writing this post and looking down at my notepad, I have to laugh a little about the big sales I am so excited about. Who else but a frugal nut would get so excited about the great prices on socks and underwear?!?! Even better, cereal on sale!! Woohoooo!! Somebody at Meijer is thinking of me!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and Matt has to work, so we'll be having the family dinner a little later than usual. The kids won't really notice a difference, but the rest of the family will. We'll do a lot of the dinner prep tonight so that it's a relatively smooth meal tomorrow. If we can get our butts up and moving early, I'm thinking a trip to the theater in Plainwell is in order! We can go see a first run movie (The Muppets) for $2.50 each if we get there before noon.