Sorry retail! Can't do it! This year it's baked goods and whatever gifties I've been picking up since May...no big shopping binge for me!!!

Are these retailers going to send me some...ohIdunno...money to spend?

No? Then they can suck it.

I'll make a gift in their name to The Human Fund. Money for people!

We're definitely spending less on Christmas because we have to budget for a new tree, and travel. I'm getting my cousins a joint gift (books) and I'll have to figure out what to get my parents (they're hard to shop for), but it won't be anything extravagent. It wasn't last year, either, but we're looking at potentially spending $300 on a new Christmas tree (we refuse to buy one after Christmas) so we have to cut back in other areas.

"He added that stable gas prices, strengthening home values and stock market gains would help support consumer spending during the all-important winter holiday season that starts on the Friday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday."

Gas prices aren't all that cheap, strengthening home values are irrelevant to "holiday retail" unless you're selling or taking out a home equity loan, and the doings of the stock market only make a difference if you have...ohIdunno...stocks.

I'd like to know an average of what everyone spends on gifts at Christmas. I never know if I'm spending more than I should or about average. Here's my breakdown:

Son and Daughter -- about $250 each. They are young adults, and this would include some practical items (socks, work clothing or shoes, etc); some small luxury items they might not buy for themselves (cosmetics, gourmet kitchen supplies, foods or tools, etsy art or jewelry, books); and a few items they might have asked for. $500 total there.

Parents (three sets including step): My parents -- about $100 each because I'm their only child; husband's four parents $50 each. $400 total.

Brothers, sisters, nephews, and close friends: $15 - $20 each. Estimated $200.

So our xmas grand total is around: $1100 -- though I'm probably not counting small co-worker gifts or service provider tips. I'll add another $100, for a grand total of $1200, max.

@Vandelay Import Export: My company would like to make a donation to the Human Fund, here is a check, please get me a receipt for my taxes.

Hey companies! Remember how you cheaped out on raises this year?

Guess what! My rent just went up, along with lots of other prices. That means I won't be buying anything for Christmas. You know, cost cutting and all that.

What goes around comes around and all that jazz.

@ZoeSchizzel: Last year, we spent about $200 on both sets of parents. It's hard when you have parents who pretty much just go ahead and buy what they want, when they want.

We spent about $40 on my cousins and a friend's kid. They're very young, and wouldn't care. This year we're hitting about the same price because we're going to keep buying educational toys, which we can find cheaper online.

I don't have siblings, and Mr. Pi only has one, so we do save money in that department. We only give gifts to two sets of family friends, and that ends up being about $70 a couple.

It really helps to have a small family!

How can they tell what holiday spending is anymore? Stores are opening up their Christmas displays now in July!

I had to take a substantial pay cut to stay employed this year. Don't expect me to pony up for you guys.

I'm just barely able to stay in beer and cigarettes.

@ZoeSchizzel:

$0 in 2006 and 2007 because i was a piss poor grad student.

$0 last year because I ran off to India.

(Now if you include all the gifts I gave out in India around that time, it came up to $800)

This year, I'll be giving my freshly minted niece something expensive that she won't really appreciate yet. And I intend to give a gift to a friend who escaped his abusive parents late last year. I am thinking of making him set up a high yield online savings account and depositing money in it with instructions to keep the hell away from it unless it is a real emergency. Or is that really uncool?

@Al Swearengen: I think they still only count what's bought after Thanksgiving if it isn't a holiday specific item. There's no way for them to tell whether or not the camera you bought in August is for a holiday gift or not.

@pecan 3.14159265: Or a really big one. Mine's so big and spread out that most of us don't bother getting gifts.

I'm pretty much waiting on the black friday circulars to decide if xmas will suck or rule this year. Good deals means loosening of the purse strings for me. Bad, stingy deals means stay at home and make pacts with family to just not exchange gifts this year.

The ball is in your court, Capitalist America.

I'll buy as many Christmas presents as you want if you stop blasting the same handful of carols in your stores from the day after Thanksgiving to NYE. Until then, I want nothing to do with Christmas.

Bah Humbug.

2 words "Dollar Store"

Maybe it is time retailers start following a different business method. As far as I understand it, they make a very large portion of their profits over the holidays. Seems like a dangerous situation. I mean, bad Xmas season, and it hurts their profit margins by a huge lot. Isn't it possible for them to try and spread the profits over the whole year instead of a single shopping season?

@catnapped: Ah yes, the phantom economy that affects only rich people! Now that my home has regained $400 in value, I can blow all that on Christmas, right?!

@MostlyHarmless: I think that's cool.

@pb5000: And he is turning 18 in december too. So I figured if I can work it into him to basically manage his finances responsibly, and set him up with a small starter/buffer, it would do him much good in the long run, and is basically worth more than buying a material gift with the same amount of money.

I travel for Christmas and with these baggage fees, all the presents for my family need to fit into my carry on with my clothes. I guess small things can be expensive too, but we are probably looking at baked goods and DVDs.

The Xmas season is getting more spread out so I am not surprised that the spending may be more flat this season, that's because its not the mad rush that starts on the day after Thanksgiving like it used to be. Not that there isn't a mad rush but the fact that the Xmas decorations are up in quite a few stores around here means that people are already buying that stuff, so if you put it out earlier its natural that the spending is going to be more spread out instead of concentrated into 2 months.

If your talking gift-giving buyers around here everyone shops for Xmas and birthdays only, if your dealing in something like toys its a hard sell for any other time of the year so that leaves the birthday gift givers to fill in for the rest of the year. Parents who take kids to the toy store tell the kids they have to wait till Xmas to get that toy they want.

Spending in my family is not extravagant. We are not spending 1k or more on each kid like some parents do. Probably a couple hundred at most. Helps that I don't have any kids in my immediate household, the rest of my family is not that extravagant. We don't buy holiday decorations other than maybe 1-2 new ornaments at the end of the season when they are super cheap. My household probably owns enough decorations to decorate 5 Xmas trees. We prefer the charm and memories that old decorations hold, some of our decorations originally belonged to my grandmother's mother.

@ZoeSchizzel: We spent about $50 on each set of parents last year. I have a huge family, so we exchange names and do ~$25 gifts. I think we spent about $25-30 on some close friends. We had two exchange students living with us and spent about $30 each on them. Kind of sparse, but if my husband and I had it our way we wouldn't do Christmas presents at all - giving or receiving. It just seems rude not to give when you know that people are going to be giving you presents though. And I would ask people not to give us presents, but it's hard to stop parents from giving presents.

@valkyrievf2x: Yup, but in my area its a hard sell for any other time of the year, people seem to only open their wallets like crazy during Xmas time.

The scary thing is if you have a lot of snow like my area frequently gets then people cannot get to the store. This means slumping sales for the retail stores. In 2006 we had power outages in some retail stores because the weather was so bad over black friday weekend. A lot of stores were not able to open. This equated in more people going online to buy their gifts and have them shipped to their house since they could not go out. Which as you guessed it, leaded to quite a dismal weekend for a lot of retailers.

If this were to happen again I could see stores losing a lot of money to previous years since 1-2 weeks of bad snow or some power outages which makes the stores unable to open (even if the stores opened no one would come because lots of people wouldn't be able to get out). The Xmas spending season is so short that 1-2 weeks of non-sales or low sales could kill their whole year.

Christmas? My employer is shutting down for the week after Christmas and sending everybody home without pay for the week. I'm thinking about spending money at Lowes and Home Depot to use the opportunity to re-do the insulation in my crawl space. Ho ho ho! Pink fiberglass snow!

OK, I beg retailers to remember that Christmas takes place at the end of December. If you agree to not start Christmas displays/sales/etc until after Thanksgiving, I'll consider shopping in your store.

@catnapped: I was just wondering the same thing!

I don't have kids so that saves a lot right there.

Each person in my family will get one thing; I always ask them what they want so I don't waste money on something they don't need/hate. Usually a DVD or a book or something. All I have to buy for is:

Dad
Mom
Sister
Sister's husband
Brother
Brother's wife
Brother's kids (I still owe my nephew something!)
One friend that I exchange gifts with

I try to keep it under $15 or $20 for each person. I'm only a receptionist and I don't make that much. Most of the time they (especially my parents) say "Oh, don't get me anything. Last year I ran out of money and ended up making my dad two mix CDs with all this cool soundtrack music on them. He LOVED it.

@Rectilinear Propagation:

If holiday spending is only stuff bought after Thanksgiving, doesn't it follow that having Christmas sales earlier than that going to reduce the official post-thanksgiving numbers and therefore look like the holiday season sucks?

Nope. Sorry retailers. Unless you have some kick ass deal I'm not ponying up for anything. Economy sucks and the banks are not playing fairly with credit card interest rates. If they want to play that way, then so be it because I'm not playing anymore.

I hope more and more people are going to pay down their debt and start saving more after we all got our reality checks.

@ZoeSchizzel: My sister spend that much on her kid. More than that, acutally... around $2000. My niece got a dell laptop, pink ipod nano, and a ton of babydolls and accessories that she's never touched. Oh yeah, she's 6. And the kid gets whatever she wants whenever she wants every other day of the year.

And she still found money to buy me a 30$ bathrobe set from Bath and Body Works, plus drop 50$ on a digital camera for me. (sister paid the other 50$ on the cam) And I'm the sister she never sees.

Plus she bought my mom a diamond necklace charm thingie. And on top of that, my family is huge and I guarantee she spent 50+ bucks on every member. Mom, dad, 2 sisters, 1 niece, 1 nephew, husband, kid, 2 sets of grandparents, mother-in-law, aunt, uncle.

And yes, she is in debt up to her eyeballs.

@calquist: This is where gift cards and mail order are wonderful things.

What would Jesus do? Given that he was a poor carpenter, he'd probably give cabinets.

I have never understood why people spend so much at Christmas. To me, getting the holiday cards and having a turkey is enough.

@whitneyvegan: This sounds like more of the norm that I am hearing, now that she spent 2k on her kid this year she will have to outdo it next year or else the kid will call her a bad parent. She probably doesn't even touch half of that stuff or use it to its fullest potential.

Its fine to get a "big" gift at Xmas, but I am a firm believer of spreading a child's gifts out throughout the whole year. Instead of getting 2-3k stuff on one day, where half of it will be shoved in a pile, lost in the Xmas mess or just totally forgotten about after that day. If you spread it out throughout the whole year then they are more likely to use what you got them instead of just throwing it in a pile or picking favorites out of the gift pile and discarding the rest. Then the rest gets thrown out on the lawn for the families annual yard sale or thrown in the basement until eternity.

I will never understand people who go into debt over Xmas for their kids or anyone (its fine to give a lot if you have the money to do it), there are plenty of ways to give nice gifts for anyone without spending everything you have and more.

How about people just stop celebrating Christmas as a giant present-fest? Maybe I am out of touch because I'm not Christian, what does the birth of Jesus have to do with having a massive pile of presents under a tree?

I think the retailers might not be seeing the portion of people who have just learned that xmas doesn't need to be all about consumption and tons of gifts you don't need. I'm lucky enough that I could afford to spend money on a bunch of gifts this year but I won't. I don't need more stuff, my family doesn't need more stuff. My bf has two nephews, so we'll buy them some games, but that's about it. And I work for a game company, so I get those cheap. (:

Bring on the deals. Sorry but I saw the recession coming and paid off my bills 18months ago. Maybe this is our reward for paying off our debt and not living outside our means (anymore)?

@MaytagRepairman: Plus you can get a TAX CREDIT!

This is kind of what the wife and I do for yourselves.

Figure out a project we want to do and spend our Xmas money on it.

@HogwartsAlum: They should be begging the credit card companies to stop fucking with our rates rather than begging us to spend more. I'm not going to rack up the typical holiday debt this year since my AMEX interest rate has nearly doubled (was 7.9 is now 15.26) since last Christmas even though my credit is flawless. I know many others here are in the same boat.

@ZoeSchizzel: My husband and I each have 1 sibling. Plus there's 4 parents and 2 grandparents and 1 aunt to shop for. PLUS we have 4 children (under the age of 9). Our budget is generally about about $800 total...and we hope to have some money left over to have fun over the Christmas break. The cash we use for Christmas comes from my husband's "sick pay bonus" he gets each year at Thanksgiving. He gets a bonus based on unused sick pay that he earned during the current fiscal year. I cash that check and when that money is gone we are DONE shopping. We have never and never will go into debt for Christmas.

@aloria: +a bazillion.

Or actually, if they stop blasting any f'ing carols. There are few things on this earth that annoy me more thoroughly than Christmas music.

It seems I've given my family members all their christmas gifts in the form of loans they'll never pay back.