My life was so simple. Then I married Roger.
You see, my whole family lives within a two hour drive of my home. We get together for holidays and exchange gifts like the Norman Rockwell painting says we are supposed to do.
Then I had to marry a southern boy.
When Roger was looking for his first grown-up job, as a senior at Purdue University, he told God his requirements. “God, I will go anywhere except California.” Yeah. That’s a good idea. Tell God what you won’t do.
So twenty-five years ago Roger got a job in Cupertino with HP and he has been a California boy ever since.
The only problem is that he left a whole family who all live in Georgia, and who all celebrate Christmas. And somehow, each year I forget that their gifts require an extra step or two.
So today, your project is to get your plan together for any out of town gifts. There are three approaches you can take:
- Order all your gifts online and have them shipped from the company.
- Buy gifts and ship them out from home.
- Make sure you’ve married a local boy or stop talking to out of state relatives and friends.
Let me know what approach you subscribe to, as well as any tips you have for gift giving for out of towners. I would love some fresh thoughts about what to do for my mother-in-law.
And here is a great suggestion from reader Kim Ward: “Kathi, with our family far away we use Wishlist.com to help organize our giving. The girls were asking each set of Grandparents for the Thing Most Wanted and that resulted in duplicate items that needed to be exchanged and sore feelings for Grandparents not getting the crazy reaction they were hoping for. Wishlist.com allows you to post ideas from any website easily or create your own manually. Then family can select what they like, ‘reserve’ it and link to the item to buy it immediately if you want. It will also send you an e-mail reminder of what you’ve reserved.”
Later in the projects, my husband Roger – the shipping guru (if you’ve ever ordered something from our store, he’s probably the one who sen it,) will be sharing all of his mailing tips for getting those gifts to Grandmother’s house.
Amazon wish lists – everyone can see what you want/need and mark it off when/if they purchase it. Super awesome when you have 9 grandparents/great-grandparents asking what your son wants/needs for Christmas/birthday. 🙂
This reminds me…I need to mail the out-of-town gifts. Hopefully today.
Personally I don’t like receiving gifts shipped directly from the company. It seems to easy and almost thoughtless, “Here I bought this for you but I’m too lazy/thoughtless/out of time to actually wrap and mail it myself.”
I made calendars for my in-laws out of town with pictures of my kids and shipped them directly to them.
For Christmas this year I had the idea of exchanging family gifts instead of drawing names, we talked about it and majority ruled so that’s what we’re doing (yes, I am an oldest, why do you ask? 🙂 ). Each sib buys for the family one younger than them (and of course the youngest rolls up to buy for the oldest). I have ordered a movie for my younger sister’s family and will pair it with the $.97 theater style candy from Walmart and a few bags of microwave popcorn. We’ve set a $20 limit for a gift the whole family will enjoy. I’ll mail it snail mail. For birthdays, however, I will order something and have Amazon do the work of getting it to them.
I am married to a local boy, but we exchange names with his siblings and spouses instead of buying for everyone. Because its so difficult to get everyone in one room to actually do the exchange, we used drawnames.com, I think it would be especially helpful for families living across the miles. The admin goes in and sets up the participants, then the email is sent asking them to join. They can create a wish list (that links to Amazon- GENIUS) and ta-da the names exchange, everyone is sent an email with their name and fun will be had by all!