Buying Christmas with Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thank giving Day is my personal favorite holiday. It is the least commercialized and the cuisine is actually very nutritious compared with all the sugars and fats of Christmas. Most importantly, Thanksgiving is all about family. The last thing I would want to do is cause my family and guests to think that while they were enjoying food and camaraderie, I was cynically calculating how much the meal was costing. On my word as a human being, nothing could be farther from the truth. Still, for many people the holidays are budget busters characterized by credit card swiping and loss of financial self-control. Since I have already described our typical Christmas spending at length in other writings, I will now describe our most recent Thanksgiving and attendant spending below.

We decided to celebrate Thanksgiving on Wednesday evening, since my daughter and her beau wanted to celebrate with his parents on Thursday. This was fine with my wife and me, since she had Wednesday off from her school job and could cook and decorate all day (which she loves to do) and since I’m a retiree, half the time I don’t know which day of the week it is anyway. My daughter had gotten a turkey from her employer which we had picked up a few days before and she also donated a gift card (which was about to expire) to a grocery store that we used to buy several bottles of wine. With the two most expensive items of the meal out of the way and with the stores running competing sales, the remainder of our feast was relatively inexpensive. We exceeded our regular weekly grocery budget by a mere $20.

Our guests arrived Wednesday evening, obviously tuckered from their workday and the long drive to our house. We all sat down at the table, gave thanks and let the food, wine and conversation flow freely the rest of the evening. The next morning, our guests surprised us by making us a big breakfast before heading out around noon to attend other Thanksgiving Day meals elsewhere.

My wife and I needed a brief vacation too, so Friday morning we took a scenic three-hour drive through farmland and woodlands to visit my sister who lives in the rustic Brown County area. We spent an afternoon in touristy Nashville, which had just finished its Christmas parade and was packed with people. The town was decked out for the holidays and someone who sounded like Willie Nelson was singing Christmas carols on the main street corner. My wife checked out the little artisan shops while I stood outside and watched hundreds of noisy migrating sand cranes circle overhead for half an hour. That night we went to Bloomington where my sister treated us to a meal at an Irish-style pub and we then got enmeshed in a throng of humanity around the courthouse for an annual winter fest to turn on the lights strung from all the street corners to the top of the courthouse. There was a lot of caroling, a brass band, Saint Nick, a clown and vendor food. The next morning, my sister took us out for breakfast to a backwoodsy little diner she frequents and we then went to the Bloomington farmer’s market where there were again carolers and an unbelievable crowd for this late in the year. As we drove home, my wife and I both felt we had enjoyed a quick, refreshing get- away.

I described our holiday to show that we really did have an enjoyable time, but how does all this relate to having money from Thanksgiving to put back toward Christmas? When the kids left Thursday, the fridge was so stuffed with food that we could barely get the door closed. The following week the microwave became our best friend. We had turkey fried rice; we had open-faced turkey sandwiches with mash potatoes and gravy; we had sweet potato and green bean casserole; we had turkey dressing with gravy and cranberries, and we had turkey vegetable soup. For breakfasts, we had deviled eggs; we had pumpkin pie, and we had hot rolls and jam. While we cleaned out our refrigerator the week after Thanksgiving, our sole grocery purchase was a gallon of milk. Most of that week’s grocery budget got dumped into the cookie jar to go toward Christmas or extra seasonal recreation. Even with our drive to Brown County, we had not exceeded our weekly gasoline budget and my sister fed us and gave us a place to sleep. Gosh, aren’t the holidays great!