4 ways to spend less this Christmas

The holidays don't need to be full of stress and credit card debt, but all too often, they are. Discover tips to ease your budget on family Christmas gifts.

Even if your family is small, buying a gift for each and every person adds up, especially when children are in the picture. Streamlining helps you save money and headaches and lets you focus on quality time.

• Trade individual gift exchanges for something like a secret Santa scenario or a white elephant gift exchange.

Secret Santa

1. Make preparations for a secret Santa exchange at least a month before your gathering.
2. Put the names of everyone attending a Christmas family party in a hat or bowl, and draw a name for each person to buy a gift for. Have participants pick the names themselves if possible.

White elephant gift exchange

For white elephant gift games, each person at a celebration brings a wrapped gift (be sure to establish a maximum cost that everyone is comfortable with). The wackier the gifts, the more laughter there will be.

1. Everyone draws a number and selects a gift in that order.
2. After the first person opens a gift, subsequent people can choose to steal a gift already opened or take their chances with a wrapped present.
3. Numerous variations exist; tweak this game to make it your own.

Even if you do something like a white elephant gift exchange for your extended family, you may want to buy individual gifts for people such as your partner and children.

• Start shopping in the off season; this also helps spread out the crunch on your wallet and bypasses expensive impulse purchases.
• If you know what kind of gift you want to give, you can keep an eye out for sales and coupons throughout the year.

Setting money aside from time to time helps you prepare and budget better for Christmas. This tactic helps you avoid using credit cards and paying more in interest over the long term.

• Estimate how much money you can and want to spend on Christmas gifts.
• Divide that amount by how many weeks remain until Christmas and you'll come up with a workable amount of money to set aside each week.
• Ideally, you would start saving around June.

You can't go wrong with homemade cards and gifts.

• They're inexpensive, personal and usually fun to make.
• Consider giving baked goods, scrapbooks, birdhouses or anything else that you enjoy making as gifts this Christmas.

There are plenty of ways to ease your budget on family Christmas gifts and reduce holiday stress. Keep the focus on quality family time by reducing gifts for everyone, saving, shopping early and putting personal twists on your gifts.