For many of us, the whole joy of the holidays is to see all the normal things (your front door, your apartment stoop, and all the local stores) decorated all crazy for different holidays throughout the year. But if you tally it all up… that’s quite a lot of seasonal cash to drop on fun things that look nice, but (if we’re honest) don’t provide a tangible value to your life.
Do you like to decorate your home for the holidays? Whether it’s Christmas lights, spooky ghosts, or a decadent table for Rosh Hashanah, if you go crazy for every holiday the cost will eventually catch up with you. Here are a few cheap ways to decorate your home during the holidays that won’t have you nursing a credit card bill a few months after:
- Go Au Natural. There’s tons of plastic stuff you could buy for every season, but sometimes that can drain your wallet, make your home look kind of tacky, and make your living room smell like a plastic factory. Instead, take a tip from upscale stores like Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and Williams Sonoma and decorate with natural seasonal items like cornstalks, hay bales, pumpkins, and trees. During every season, there are natural items you can include around your home which, matched with a colorful seasonal ribbon, can make your home super classy and natural.
- Shop second hand. Too obvious? I don’t think so. It’s easy to say that shopping second hand should always be on your list, but these discount stores should be even more at the front of your mind during the holiday season. Shops like Goodwill and Salvation Army often curate seasonal sales around the holidays with items specifically geared towards each season. They’ll collect all the linens and household items of seasonal colors, including second-hand decorations and holiday-specific items in one place at a fraction of the cost of the items new.
- Skip it. If you’re super-hippy and you don’t have kids… consider skipping it all together and making a donation to your favorite charity! (And if you’re trying to save money, skip the donation). Instead of decorating everything, you can draw fun pictures of things that represent the holidays for you and disperse them around the house. If that sounds a little dire to you, consider making a date of it and inviting your friends or loved ones to a painting party where you can make slightly more elaborate (but still homemade) decorations that won’t cost more than the paper, markers, and paint you use to create them. (Check out Halloween drawing decoration ideas here!).
What are your plans for the holidays? Hopefully not to spend tons of cash on something so transitory. But if you do, use these tips to spend less on the decorations and have more for your savings account.
Do you go all out for the holidays? If you HAD to skip decorating for one, which would it be?
Our house is decorated with a bow on the door, stockings, candles, knick knacks and our decorated fake Christmas tree. We’ve accumulated everything over the years and didn’t spend anything this year. Most of the knick knacks were gifts and the first year I decorated the tree I used a few packs of Dollar Store decorations (which we still use actually).
The outdoor lights set us back a bit, and we don’t usually even put them out anymore.
Even though we didn’t spend anything, the house still feels festive and I really enjoy all the trimmings.
We have accumulated a lot of decorations over the years. We use an artificial tree too so we have no new costs for Christmas decorating. I did scale back this year by skipping outside decorating other than some artificial wreaths I hung around my Porch/Garage lights. Not having a lot of lights outside saves on the power bill. Inside we went all out. It makes the season fun.
I totally use the DIY art only it’s via my kids. We went to the dollar store for decorations the first year of our relationship, and have just reused that stuff every year, too. I like the au natural idea, though!
I don’t go out all the way. I actually used decorations that I had last year. I just have to squeeze out my creativity in me to make it look better and nicer.