How to Use Thanksgiving to Save on Christmas: Right Off My Christmas List
It’s Thanksgiving Day, and your grandmother has invited everyone over. As she lifts the first slice of pie out of the pan, she invites everyone back for Christmas. You begin to panic as you look around the room. Between your aunts, uncles and cousins, you now have to buy 30 Christmas gifts … and that doesn’t even include Dad’s side of the family! You’re in college. You can’t afford that. You need a way to guarantee you won’t have to buy gifts for everyone, and you need it now.
Fear not, broke college student! I have created a short list of ways to get out of gift buying for nearly everyone in your family. Follow these guidelines on Thanksgiving, and you’ll never need to worry about gift giving again.
- Bring up “the incident”: Every family has that one story you’re never supposed to talk about. Well, now’s your chance to bring it up, or more accurately, get someone else to bring it up. Anyone who defends that story is now permissibly off your shopping list.
- Start a fight: You need to be careful with this one. You can’t start a fight with your grandparents, that’s just disrespectful, but you can start one with an uncle or aunt. Find a topic you know they’ll disagree with (politics will usually do the trick). Whoever disagrees with your position no longer gets a gift from you.
- Plan everyone’s funeral to their face: Although death is inevitable, no one likes to talk about it, especially during a global pandemic. Make sure you’re never invited to family gatherings again by planning everyone’s funeral. Bonus points if you plan out all of Aunt Carol’s ex-husbands’ and predicted future husbands’ funerals, too.
- Set fire to the food: This one is only to be used as a last resort. Start a small fire at the house. Don’t burn anything important, but maybe setting the roasting chestnuts on fire would work. Once you burn something, guess who’s no longer invited to family Christmas? That’s right … you! You can’t give gifts to people if you aren’t there.
As a poor, broke college student, you can’t afford to buy your entire extended family Christmas gifts. All your money gets sucked into tuition. Save yourself some money. Make at least half of your family hate you. Sure, they won’t give you anything, but if it wasn’t going to be a gift card to Starbucks, did you really want it anyway?
Lacey Stecker is a Sophomore
Communications Major from
Noblesville, Indiana