Cheap Christmas Vacations

by Crystal

For cheap Christmas vacations I recommend planning your vacations around local venues that will offer you priceless times with family without the drama of airfare, the stress of special shopping lists, or the necessity of overpriced and decidedly non-homey hotel rooms. While there might be time off from school and/or work it’s still a holiday and I generally think of it being spent either with family at home, or by visiting family elsewhere, and in either case revolving around holiday traditions. Still, there are many reasons to want to add more special activities to a holiday opportunity.

Many cities and counties put out a free magazine on a monthly or seasonal basis, which can be found stacked in newspaper dispensers and public-service business counters. These are wonderful resources for learning about venues offering family-friendly holiday events and/or ongoing activities, hosted by the local government, organizations, business, and sometimes even private citizens. Some will be completely free; others will be free to enter and will offer a mix of free and charged elements; others yet will have admission charges, often variable by age, or with family / group / pay-per-car rates. (Almost any of them will be cheaper if you bring an insulated container with your own food and drink, and leave it in the car.) In my experience, any area you live in is likely to have more going on than you are going to hear about unless you actively seek out the information.

Of course, many special memories can be made without any extra help at all. It is easy to turn things that could easily go on around you all the time, into new, Christmas vacation traditions. A local park and the snow in it are free, and with a little checking with the city first on any specific regulations, you can add some decorations to surrounding trees, and a fire pit or bonfire. Bring in some music, some camp chairs and a lot of thermoses of hot cocoa for those taking breaks from the building of snowball-fight forts, snowman contests and sled runs, and you have yourself a party.

You can browse freecycle.org, craigslist.org and the managers in charge of “claimsed” items at stores, and collect free decorations, then call around and plan to spend an afternoon decorating the common room in a nursing home, rooms in hospitals, etc. Spend an evening driving around town giving yourselves a Christmas lights tour. Bundle up and go for a walk through a forest nature trail, taking in how gorgeous and different everything looks when covered with ice and snow. Vacations are about having the chance to do things you normally don’t do, and Christmas vacations are about doing those things with the ones you love. There is no reason why that has to be expensive, or far from home.