I promised it, and here it is — my unsolicited narrative of where I’m shopping this season. No one is paying me to do this, but I really appreciate the ideas I’ve seen on other blogs and thought I’d reciprocate by posting my own.
The day after Thanksgiving (yes, Black Friday), we went shopping. After about an hour we couldn’t stand it anymore. It was as frenzied as anything I’ve ever seen, and nothing seemed all that interesting. We went home without spending a dime.
For me, it’s not about buying something to buy it. I really want the gifts I give to mean something. We are really lucky to have what we have and if we didn’t get one more thing we’d have more than enough. So if I’m going to spend money, I want to get the most for it and I want the gift to be special, fun, and have some thought behind it.
I decided that one thing I wanted to do this year was to get gifts from unique stores either online or with local storefronts. With the ubiquitous superstores commanding the season, I feel like it’s important to give some attention to the smaller, more specialized stores. I’m giving Moo Cards to dancergirl (she liked mine and Sticks’ a lot), I bought Bigdog a GorillaPod for his little video camera, and I’m going to do calendars for my mom and Bigdog’s mom using my photos and Costco photo services.
Flickr extensions for some family and friends are on the horizon, too, and I bought domain names for the kids. Sticks will get a website with his to help promote his music transcription business. (I bought Drummr.com and Drummr.net for him over at GoDaddy)
Still, there are some things that will come from the megastores, so I’m watching for deals. Colleen over at GeekySpeaky just started a new site that’s helping a lot with that: BuyMeBlog, where she posts coupon codes, online and offline deals, and some product reviews. She’s got one about 600 thread count sheets that made me laugh — we have an ongoing debate in our house about whether 600 thread count is a myth or the truth. Even if they were 300 thread count, $50 isn’t so bad for a full set of queen size sheets, which is on our Christmas list — ours are about 40 threads per inch, they’re so threadbare.
Now, if someone could just tell me where to score a Nintendo Wii (full price of course) with Zelda for less than $600 (the going price on EBay right now), I’ll be a happy shopper.
If you have some unique gift ideas, I’d love to hear them — post a comment and let me know! Time’s running out for online purchasing but there’s still some time, so shout out in the comments, too.
Technorati Tags: holiday, gifts, shopping, nintendo wii, moo, godaddy, 2006, BuyMeBlog
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