My wife Christy is the sweetest, most loving person I know. She lives for Christmas every year, and when I say she lives for Christmas, I mean that boxes, and boxes, and boxes of Christmas decorations come out during Thanksgiving weekend. We're in a winter wonderland from Thanksgiving until Super-Bowl Sunday. On top of that, she does an amazing job of shopping for all of our loved ones, and finds some of the most fantastic gifts possible.

A big change in plans. Years ago, my side of the family about put my wife into a state of depression when a couple family members who were going through really tough times financially said they wanted to "skip Christmas". Although Christy couldn't fathom the thought of "skipping Christmas" - she also respected our family's concerns, so she suggested an idea that would make everyone happy, no matter how fat (or lean) their wallet was.

Little did we all know that it would actually lead to one of the greatest Christmases we had seen since getting married. There was only one rule to the "McDonald Family Christmas on a Budget": No one is allowed to spend any money unless it was for indirect expenses such as taxes, or shipping & handling, but nothing could actually be spent on the presents themselves.

Are you kidding? At first, this sounded rediculous. We thought Christy had lost it, but it still beat the "bah humbug" notion of skipping a gift-exchange all together. At first, we figured that everyone would be swapping "redeemable for one homemade dinner", or "free massage" vouchers that we each printed on our computers, but things started to get really fun. You'd be amazed at what you can find for free when you put your mind to it.

Let the Competition begin. We all started entering drawings, can calling into radio shows, and within a week of working toward our goal of a zero-expense christmas, my wife won a pair of skis! She wouldn't tell the others what she won, but it got the competition rolling. In the following weeks all of us started to get more and more into the competition and make a mission of finding the best free gift possible.

• I joined BMG Music Service, and got 6 free CD's after paying full-price for one, and then I signed Christy up, got 4 more for "signing up a friend", and then got another 6 CDs. (I ended up getting 16 CDs for the price of 2 (plus shipping & handling.)) Bam - in Christmases past - I might have been done at this point because I was able to get a couple brand-new CDs for everyone in our immediate family. However, this was a contest... I wasn't even close to being done!
• Christy & I continued to enter contests & won a few more trinkets, but nothing beat her pair of skis that she ended up giving to our sister-in-law.

• Macy's was having a sale, and as long as I spent a minimum of $25, I got a free bottle of Jadore perfume. I bought myself a wallet, and picked up a $65 dollar bottle of perfume for my wife. I went back later & got two more bottles for my Mom & sister-in-law.
• All of us started finding various deals like "buy a $20 gift certificate, and get a $10 certificate free".
• I'm a Realtor, and one of our Title Companies gives away decent-quality pens to sign at closing. (You'd pay $20 or $25 at a store for a pen like what they gave away.) Every time I had a closing, I collected one, and when my Title rep found out what I was doing, she thought it was so cool, she gave be a whole box of them!
• Buy one, get one dinner coupons... Stocking Stuffers.
• As seen on TV salad chopper food processing gizmos? We bought one for ourselves & gave the free one as a gift.
• You know those kiosks in the mall set up for Christmas season only? Visit them 20 minutes before closing time. They get bonuses based on units sold, and they'll negotiate like crazy. We talked a couple of them into "buy one, get three free" deals...
  

December 25th. Unlike most Christmas gift exchanges where everyone just gives whatever random gifts they found the week before, every single gift we gave came with a story about how we got it. You would think that limitation would mean even less meaningful gifts, the effect was quite the opposite... Because we had to start looking in October, each of us probably put more thought into the gifts we found than any other gift we purchased in the past. We spent all morning opening presents, enthusiastically telling stories about how we found each and every present. We shared more laughs and exciting stories than any other Christmas I remember before that.

If you're on a tight budget... During these tough times, who isn't on a budget? If you've got family members who are on a tight budget, I highly recommend trying the idea of a Free Christmas. We added up what the gifts we purchased would have cost had we actually paid retail prices for them, and figured that we gave 5 or 6 times as many gifts as we would have, had we actually paid for them. And the Christmas day experience itself???

Priceless.