Christmas Shopping and I

I have officially completed all of my Christmas shopping, with the exception of three people whose gifts must be purchased closer to the actual holiday itself, and I couldn’t be happier! I am the queen of Black Friday shopping, although more of my shopping was actually done before and/or on Thanksgiving, I even started wrapping presents already, which is a first for me, since I’m the one who uses and abuses gift bags (out of pure laziness, but not this year)!

I am very particular in how I strategize my Christmas shopping. It’s relatively easy, but I definitely add, erase, delete numerous times until I’m done with the entire shopping process. Around my birthday, which is in early November, I start to put together the list of people I know I will need to purchase gifts for. This includes family and friends. Once that is done, I start adding gift ideas to each person with the items I think I want to buy them.

Once sales start to roll in, usually the weekend after my birthday, I start to edit, update, and/or change entirely my gift list and ideas until I physically hit “purchase” on the order. This year, for obvious reasons, I decided to completely purchase everything online; this of course has certain exceptions, mostly because they’re either booze, gift cards, or something that needs to be shipped closer to the actual date (like my godson’s gift that needs to be shipped to Washington D.C., but I refuse to send it this early because he’d get it tomorrow and not for/on Christmas).

Being the queen of Black Friday/Holiday shopping and all, most people ask me where I bought the gifts from so they can checkout the sales there too. On Friday, my older sister texted our sister chat asking how the sales were and whether we had been shopping. My little sister hasn’t really done much, but I did so I told her where I got the most bang for my buck. This year that happened to be Nordstrom, Vineyard Vines, and Amazon.

With tomorrow being Cyber Monday, and because my gift giving list has been completed, I am going to focus on getting some items I personally have wanted but will not be asking for Christmas because they are a bit outside of the budget that I know my family sets for gifts. My mom is looking for a bigger TV so she plans to get that in the Cyber Monday sales, and my aunt is looking for the same so Best Buy, Target, Brandsmart USA, and Walmart are where they will be looking.

Now, I do want to make sure I note that, although I drop a shit ton of money this weekend on gifts. I still, always, give back and this year the United Way of Miami-Dade has a Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign that encourages you to make a donation matching your “guilt level”. Since I spent so much money, my guilt level is towards the highest part of the “guilt meter”. Where is yours?