Listeners share (anonymous!) tips on how they make time in their lives for romance and intimacy. Since Sarah and I are not anonymous we don’t get too personal here, but we do talk about whether we actually celebrate Valentine’s Day or not (this year I decided to purchase fun gifts for my kids…I mean hey — we all need a little midwinter levity).

In the Q&A we address a listener question: Is there a male equivalent of BOBW? We’d love suggestions of podcasts with a similar vibe!

Please give the episode a listen. As always we welcome ratings and reviews, and please consider joining us in our Patreon community. Our monthly meet-up will be next week, where we discuss our “Adventure Project.”

To which I say bah humbug. It can be fun to indulge in the holiday magic, especially if you have lots of kids around. There will be many years with a lot less magic in life! It’s OK to be a little busier in December around these festive holidays (whatever you celebrate) as life has much less busy phases.

In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I discuss holiday plans (+ December birthdays), holiday fun lists, gift giving, and making sure there is something fun for you. Especially if your kids are off school for a while, it can be good to make sure you have a break during this time! We end with a question from a listener about how to involve kids in holiday + vacation planning.

Please give the episode a listen! And please consider joining the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. Next week, on December 12th, we’ll be gathering via Zoom for our annual Goal Setting Workshop, which Sarah will lead. If you’ve been curious about her Best Laid Plans Academy content, this is a way to get a little taste — and clarify your intentions for 2024. Membership is $9/month. See you there!

On the plus side, we got our family photos back from Yana and they turned out well! I’m posting some over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). As predicted, wrangling the children was stressful but also as predicted, I’m really happy to have the pictures. Now we need to make the Christmas card!

I started holiday shopping in earnest this week. Some children are easier to shop for than others. I am really struggling with what to get the 12-year-old. He has promised to think about it and help me out. I should note that he has about $60 in birthday gift card money that he has yet to spend. Contentment is good but this does make gift giving challenging! I welcome ideas on what anyone buys pre-teen boys.

Also in financial news: We set the 10-year-old up with a bank account. Our family policy is to get the kids an account at age 10 so they can start learning about saving and investing. This has been fun to watch. The 14-year-old bought Disney stock on the dip of the pandemic when the theme parks were closed. He was bullish on them coming back and has been rewarded for that bet. I should note that in general we are index-fund-oriented investors who don’t try to time the market, but that is a lot less interesting for kids starting out.

I’ve been pondering what to choose as my 2022 year-long read. I have really enjoyed reading through War and Peace at the pace of one chapter a day during 2021. Right now I’m having to restrain myself from just finishing the darn thing (only about 150 pages to go). After some thought, I’m pretty sure that I will spend 2022 reading through all the works of Shakespeare. I found a reading plan that assigns the plays and poems and sonnets to appropriate times of the year (we start with Twelfth Night, of course, for early January!) and I have a copy of the collected works, so I think that should work well. Humorously, the front of the book notes that it was “purchased at Stratford on Avon, England,” by my husband, during the summer of 1988, back when he was bumming around Europe as a student.

And speaking of books — though not quite so classic…the Kindle version of 168 Hours is on sale for $1.99 today over at Amazon. If you haven’t read my first time management book and were thinking about doing so, today would be a good day to get a copy!

Photo: I think of this as the album cover image. There are some with our faces over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). Photo credit Yana Shellman.

Here are the strategies I found helpful, that maybe other people will too.

Stay organized by making gift lists. And start early! If you have a bullet journal or planner this can be a collection, started whenever you want (like…January?). I have been keeping track of what is ordered or needs to be ordered, and what arrived. As an extension of this, I have been opening boxes immediately because we still have everyday household items arriving from Amazon and it’s frustrating to realize that the supplies for a kid’s school project are now at the bottom of the gift closet. Speaking of which…

Pick a gift closet (or room). We store all presents in a closet in the guest room, with children forbidden to enter. We kind of ran out of space, though, so there’s also a pile in the bedroom with a giant blanket over it. It works. This is also where we keep wrapping paper, scissors, and tape, and where the bulk of the wrapping has happened.

Have the kids buy for each other. We had never done this before but finally decided to do so — and I am a big fan! We managed to pull this off with two Target trips and a little supplemental online shopping. We gave the kids a budget and then had them think through what their siblings would want. The upside is that there will be more stuff under the tree that I didn’t come up with. Another upside: the kids all learned how difficult it can be to make wrapped presents look nice, and I got a few bonus points for past present aesthetics. Another item in the category of “things mom did that we didn’t think about”…that is now thought about.

Get help with the wrapping. G (nanny) and I took a morning and did the bulk of it. It went much quicker this way!

Give each category of gift its own wrapping paper. Each child has their own paper — courtesy Costco’s double-sided big rolls — which allows me to see if the piles are relatively equal. This is no longer a perfect solution (big kid gifts tend to be small and expensive; little kid gifts are big and cheap!) but helps make sure things don’t get too out of whack. I also wrapped the presents for my extended family in a different color wrapping paper, so these can be found for that party, and the adult presents for Christmas morning will be in their own color wrapping paper too.

Re-use gift tags. We bought two giant boxes of gift tags from Costco a few years ago, and have been re-using them ever since. Someone just collects them on Christmas morning and stuffs them right back in the box!

Gift buying responsibilities can be split in different ways. I took the lead on Christmas, assigning my husband certain gifts that I was going to have trouble figuring out (all electronics seem the same to me, so he needs to sort out what’s the “right” thing to get). But my husband takes the lead on our kids’ birthdays, and is fully responsible for buying all presents for these celebrations. It comes out fairly evenly over time. (We are each responsible for our own extended families.)

Have a go-to gift. For the past few years I’ve gotten the adults in my extended family something similar within a theme, purchased from the same retailer. Nice slippers, blankets, Christmas tree ornaments, scarves, etc. might all be options that work for most people.

What strategies do you have for gift buying and wrapping?