How a trip instead of gifts made Christmas better

Hey friends. It’s a new year, and like most of you, I’m reflecting on how the last year went, and what I want to do differently this year. But what I really want to tell you is, how a trip instead of gifts made Christmas better for our family. This is for sure something I want to do again!

We’ve got four kids and a year ago I wrote a blog titled, What almost every parent wants to tell you about Christmas Gifts.  I was real honest about the amount of junk toys (cheap plastic stuff that breaks quickly and looses it’s luster real fast), and thankfully our friends and family took notice.

Change came this year.

This year for Christmas, our extended family and friends invested in larger family gifts, not so many individual toys, and we offered our kids an option.

Either get 3-4 gifts from us, or get 1 gift + a trip to the beach. Thankfully they chose a trip to the beach!  So my husband and I did our Christmas shopping in one night at Target. We picked up one gift from us, and one from Santa. We thoughtfully purchased for each child, and that included the majority of stocking stuffers too. Our grand spending total that night was just under $500. So $125 per kid. That’s pretty good.

What changed is that they were just as excited about taking a trip together, as they were to open gifts. This gave them something special to look forward too.

Trips help you look forward to time together.

Having a trip on the calendar also helped our children to experience delayed gratification. A big lesson many kids today don’t learn enough about. I’m not pointing fingers here.

Spending 5 days together fills up everyone’s love tank.

My mom uses the example about how when you spend time together, make memories and speak kind words, it fills up your love tank. Then when we are snappy or have hard days, we have a balance to draw from.

Well we swam, went to the aquarium, got lots of cuddles, saw pretty christmas lights, ate donuts, enjoyed a pirate dinner show, and did lots of all out family time. So we are all filled up again!  We made lots of memories and took lots of pictures to add to our family yearbook I do every year.

Here are some pictures to show what a blast we had!