I feel I have to post even though it's a bit of tooting my own horn.
I have to say, I did not sew morsbags this year, sadly. But, I'm FREE of overcommitting myself to crafts.
I spent $20 and made 30 bags of these:
FamilyFun: Holiday Pretzel Treats Recipe - and More Family Fun
Everyone at the school, plus the bus driver, mailman, UPS guy, and anyone else I can think of, will get a colorful cello bag with 10 of those little yummies in it.
Katie and I made the batch up last night in about 2 hrs. Having 0 temps outside meant sticking them in a deep freeze for 10 minutes and they were ready to bag up! (No need to clear room in the fridge or freezer.) We did four cookie sheets' worth. How that breaks down: 2 bags Snaps pretzels (maybe could have snuck by with one, but they're only 2.19 ea and now we have snacks for the week), 2 bags Hugs, 2 bags Kisses, 1 medium bag M&M's (plenty left over), 40 cello bags from Big Lots at 80c for 20. I didn't shop sales for the candy; I happened to be in the supermarket early this month and I had the money in our account so I sprung for it all then. Planning is good; when we were ready I just went down to the pantry and grabbed the bag of supplies and we were good to go. I break that all down in case anyone else wants to make them for gifts. So a bag of a dozen comes to about $1 at our grocery prices. We ended up with a bag of 10 for maybe 85-90c including the bag.
Here is where simple/easy/quick is not thrifty. We shopped online for extended family late last week/this weekend. We spent a max of $20 a person when it is all averaged out.
I was unable to sew because my basement is about 25-30 degrees and we have not had the money to get it heated. I do have plans to sew a solstice dress for Katie, but for that I can bring the machine up during the day while the kids are at school. I've been too busy working to do that and I even still feel guilty taking a day or two off this week to do that! But I will. But anyway, bringing the machine up and knocking out morsbags assembly-line style just wasn't going to happen.
I am still sending each household, including my aunt/uncle, a felted soap in the mail today. (So just 3 of those going out.) We have those ready. Tomorrow night we'll make a few extra felted soaps to fill in, for teacher gifts - just the main teachers and a few key people on Jake's team are getting the felted soaps.
My kids and dh are shopped for. I bought them one nice gift each a few months ago. I added some books for each of them over the weekend via amazon.
I have a list of things to do this week but it's manageable. We will food shop and make some things to bring to our friends' on Solstice - we'll be traveling about 2.5 hrs to visit them this weekend.
I feel - light. Relaxed. Not hectic. Now part of that is, I'm giving myself some time off work this week - what a nice gift to give myself.
I have a lull in work and I just can't quite ramp it up to query my butt off this week. But, it's still just wonderful to have all this done and be able to really relax and enjoy the season. Each year I've tried to achieve this but have not succeeded - this past week has always been filled with a million things to do and no time to do them. Not this year.
My main strategies are: assembly line gifts for teachers/staff that my kid can help with, shopping online whenever possible, using Thanksgiving break (we get the whole week) to craft those assembly line gifts. Oh and looking early for kids...which is hard sometimes because their interests change. I kind of lucked out this year. But I try to get their main gift bought by Nov 1. So the other piece of that was, I only did 2 small gifts for each kid besides the main gift. So really keeping it simple, helps a lot.
Dh and I don't usually exchange gifts, but this year he put in some $ toward a new laptop for me for work (the rest paid by my own income! yippee!) and he got my handmedown laptop as his gift. Over vacation I will back it up and reformat it for him and clean it up a little so it feels "new" (and stops freezing, which is what was driving ME bananas, and when working FT I have not had the time to stop everything for several days of work to back up and reformat). Anyway, my point - we were done early. I'm typing on my Xmas gift.
Julie 
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