Healthier Holidays

Do Americans have too much money and time to spend in the mall? When you have Easter candy around in October and Halloween candy around in March, you know there is a problem of excessive holidays. When it’s a week after Christmas and you put out hands down the most trash on garbage day, there is a problem with excessive holidays.Problems with excessive holidays:

•Holidays and birthdays can develop into a competition between the relatives to see who could buy the most presents.

•By buying so much for children during a holiday, they can loose all sense of appreciation for the gifts.

•Buying too much during the holidays can be very inconsiderate to the parents because so much it ends up being a huge chore to keep clean, organize or exchange.

•Excessive holidays can teach children to be materialistic and wasteful. These are not good traits to take into adulthood. This is one reason so many young adults spend their way into credit debt by assuming they have to show their love by buying people things. Or worse, it may cause young adults judge how much a partner loves them by the things they buy.

•When someone who showers people with overabundant generosity to their own detriment it can produce undue stress in the receiver of the gift. The receiver of the gift can feel a sense of guilt and confusion about receiving an over-the-top gift from someone that can’t afford it. A gift that produces these feelings in the receiver is hardly a gift.Tips to avoid holiday excess:

•Wrap multiple gifts together. Then a child is able to see how many gifts he or she has upfront. When the gifts keep coming and coming it makes it had for children to know when the gifts will stop. It doesn't really help children to appreciate the gifts already unwrapped. Children will just kept tossing what they unwrapped aside and say "Where's the next one?" If there are a set number of boxes, if would help. (Even if the one box had multiple wrapped presents inside.)

•Reduce the gifts to a couple meaningful gifts per child, then instead of hours spent opening presents the kids could spend more time at the Christmas, birthday or Easter party playing and socializing. Cheap toys. More than a couple times, I’ve heard family members say, "I just had to get her both since they were so cheap".

•Put a size on it. Some people get carried away with shopping that they don’t realize how much they bought. Promise to only fill one reasonably-sized box with gifts for a child and stick to it.

•Let your family know what you are trying to teach your children. Share with them strategies for keeping holidays from being excessive.

•If your child is the receiver of an excessive amount of gifts, you could say "X didn’t know what to get you so she bought you all this stuff so that you could choose 4 things and gift the rest to Goodwill."

•Let the parents buy the candy.

•Remember: "the best things in life aren't things." You can’t buy kids love.