Christmas Loot!

There are a lot of things that I really love about my husband.  First off, I learn, daily, from the respect he shows other people.  Whether he knows them or not, they get treated with the highest amount of value (especially his parents).  Second, whether he’s just met you or knows almost entirely everything about your life, he always has questions to ask.  When I first introduced him to my great grandma in 1995, I remember him asking her a million questions (which she loved, of course) and very earnestly, she told me with a smile, “The wisest people in the world ask a lot of questions.”  And lastly, he is very disciplined when it comes to spending and saving money.   Of course, there are a lot of other things that I love about him, but these are my top three :). 

What’s strange about these amazing attributes is that that they are the things that I struggle with the most.  So, how could one argue that there wasn’t a HIGHER appointment in our introduction and relationship? 

I’ve been reading and hearing a lot lately about the amount of money spent on Christmas this year.  In just that one day, I read in an msn article that there was over 11 billion dollars spent in actual stores!  Dave Ramsey mentioned in an interview he did with Family Minute that over 75% of that obscene dollar amount was spent using credit cards!  Yikes!  That is beyond scary to me! 

About 4 years ago, Matt and I vowed to each other NEVER to purchase anything on credit again (except our house) and to put every extra penny that we had towards paying off our debt (school loans, credit card, cars, home equity line of credit).  It was a struggle at first, but somehow, we’ve managed to keep that promise.  There are A LOT of times that we look at each other and I can read in his eyes that he’d really like to buy that fancy new lawn mower NOW and pay for it next year or that he’d love nothing more than to have that four wheeler with the snow plow this winter so that he could plow the driveway and make payments on it for the next....ohhhh...5 years!  Hmmmmm….I won’t lie and say that I never thought twice about it, either.  Although, I had my own temptations…an embroidery machine, a swimming pool, and yes, I also wanted the lawnmower, too J.

We pay for everything with cash.  If we don’t have the cash, we DON’T buy it…and that goes for Christmas presents, too.  We budget throughout the year to pay cash for every Christmas gift we purchase.  And shamefully, until last week, I hadn’t began to think about purchasing ANY of these gifts!  We had a pretty busy November, which is the excuse I'm using for not starting my shopping a bit earlier.  So, I made my first withdrawal last week of $300 and headed out to make a few purchases.  I’ll take part of the blame that someone was brave enough to steal my Christmas stash out of my purse because I was slightly distracted by a particular 2 year old that was suffering the consequences of being on a VERY strong antibiotic for over a week.  I felt violated, angry, ashamed, frustrated…all in that 1 second it took me to piece everything together and realize my cash was gone.  But then it left…I immediately went to the thought of how Matt would react and I got SCARED!  This seemed like a good enough reason to him to become a single dad!  In about the next 30 minutes, I talked to management at the store, filed a police report, called my mom and Matt.  After a quick conversation with my forgiving husband, he said, “It sucks!  But it’s not like we won’t be able to buy our kids any Christmas presents now.”  He was right.  Then, the thoughts I had about the thief using my husbands hard earned pay for drugs or porn or something changed to thoughts of a single parent using it to buy a special present for their son or daughter.  Still…not good to steal, but the anger and frustration left me and I was grateful for a husband that encouraged our family to live the way we do and PLAN for things like this.  If something like this had happened when every last penny of Matt’s paycheck was going to make our monthly loan payments, we would have been in trouble for sure. 

I shared a little bit of this story with the kids a few days back and Gabe asked if the person who took Mommy’s money went to jail.  Nate reminded him that we don’t know who took it.  Then, they both started asking questions about how it was going to affect their loot on Christmas morning.  Hmmmmm…how did I explain this?  I clarified that it was a little frustrating, but that Mommy and Daddy plan for unexpected things to happen and that Christmas would still go on.  I was also feeling a little frustrated that as hard as we try to teach the kids that Christmas isn’t about the presents, that’s immediately where their minds went. 

I decided when I went to my journal later that night that this was a good example for them to read in the future, about why it’s important to have a plan for unexpected situations.  After all, one of the things we try to teach them is not to make the same mistakes we did as young adults (buying everything we coveted because we thought we DESERVED it).  We want them to grow up, knowing that we only spend what we HAVE and not what we think we’ll have some day or what we think we deserve.  We encourage them to give, save, and THEN spend. 

The icing on the cake to this entire situation was about midnight last Tuesday while I was finishing up this journal entry (another moment of appointment).  Gabe came into the living room with his little plastic jar labeled “God Cares,” and handed it to me.  “Why aren’t you in bed, Gabe?  Go back to bed.”  He insisted, “You can have the money in my piggy bank to buy some presents for Nate and Adri since you had yours stolen.”  As my heartstrings tugged at this moment, not wanting to forget that sweet, giving, and unselfish attitude that Gabe was showing me, I held back some tears (not all of them), and assured him that everyone would still get presents for Christmas, but that I was really pleased with his giving attitude.  Now, that’s what Christmas is about…maybe they are starting to get it, after all!

Merry Christmas, friends!