Frugal Christmas Ideas

by Leslie

Our son is the first grandchild in the family, and we spent the first three years of his life halfway across the country from all of our extended family members. As you might imagine, that was not the most popular of circumstances, especially around the holidays. This situation lent itself to having the majority of our brainstorming over frugal Christmas ideas revolve around ways to make the rest of our family feel closer to us.

In the end, we decided to give our (literally) distant family, in essence, the year that they’d missed with us, and which we had missed with them. Our computer had come with the Microsoft Office Suite on it, so we made use of the PowerPoint program. Neither of us had ever used the program before, but it was not hard to figure out. We used photos of our family – naturally, with emphasis on our son – to create a slideshow. I gave the slideshow a theme, using a current family portrait at the beginning along with a text block saying something like, “You have our family’s fondest prayers this Christmas, but you have been in our thoughts through all seasons, as we…” Then, photos were grouped by things like, “played,” “learned,” “laughed,” “loved,” etc. Seasonal images were pulled off the internet and used as backgrounds for the photos, and Christmas music was chosen and added to the slideshow, to play in the background. We hunted down a program which would allow us to convert the PowerPoint slideshow into a file format that would play like a movie, and then borrowed a friend’s DVD burner to make a copy for each household we were gifting. An image was created on the computer to be the cover for the cases. The only cost to the gifts was the price of a spool-pack of blank DVDs and a package of those thin CD cases. They wrapped easily, and shipped inexpensively along with Christmas cards, in a those bubble-wrap padded envelopes.