November arrived earlier than ever this year, probably due to global warming. That means it’s time for you to kick back and relax for the rest of the season, because your Christmas shopping is already done.
Unless you’re like me. I just found out that people my age are technically adults. This classification burdens me with the responsibility of orchestrating a Flawless Holiday Season. Someone should have told me sooner! For I have not started thinking about what presents to give my loved ones, let alone how to make scarecrow table settings out of oak leaves, Q-tips, and leftover jack-o’-lantern scraps.
I’m also discovering the financial strains of the holidays. I haven’t yet paid down my Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Arbor Day, Administrative Professionals’ Week, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day credit card bills. Yet somehow I’m supposed to budget funds for making enough fudge to give to everyone I know. These folks will eventually throw it away because EVERYONE is giving them fudge, and they can’t pawn it off on the dog without killing it.
Someone has to figure out a way to survive the holidays without going broke. Until someone does, I’ll offer you my own Totally Not Miserly Money Tips for a Flawless Holiday Season. If you start now, you can sprinkle your financial creativity piecemeal across the entire season.
Miserless Money Tip #1: Do Not Get Suckered Into “Selling” Your Halloween Candy
Dentists across the nation run a pyramid scheme every year wherein they offer to “buy back” treats. You might think this is a get-rich-quick scheme, wherein you can get rich quickly. You would be wrong! Many dentists, undoubtedly poorer than real doctors, try to buy your candy for coupons, toothbrushes, Hygiene Kits, and other lame stuff instead of money.
They then ship the candy to troops overseas. This sounds noble, except that no one—not even a little sister—is dumb enough to trade away the good candy. So dentists send the military entire cases of fruit-flavored Tootsie Rolls, which demoralizes the soldiers, which means the terrorists win and we’ll never have Christmas again.
So, please, hang on to your candy. Trust me. You will need the sugar buzz to pull off the next Totally Not Miserly Money Tip with gusto:
Miserless Money Tip #2: Turn to Organic Landscaping
Time is money, and responsible homeowners spend entire days raking their lawns and bagging leaves. Or so I hear.
What if, instead of throwing away precious resources, you commit to bettering yourself and the environment? Unlike more time-consuming commitments, this one is simple: Don’t rake your lawn. The leaves will degrade naturally and return their nutrients to the soil, thereby improving the long-term health of your property and leaving you more time to watch football.
Yes, your neighbors will complain at first. Seize this moment to offer them your business card (which can be handwritten on the back of a grocery receipt) and explain that you are an Organic Landscaping Consultant. For the entry-level price of several hundred dollars, they too can reap the benefits of healthy living!
At best, you make millions of dollars. At worst, you don’t throw out your back raking leaves, and you don’t tear holes in your jeans, which is really good because shopping for new jeans is the worst experience I have had all year.
Sturdy, dependable blue jeans used to be the national symbol of America. They reflected our commitment to quality, our dedication to ruggedness, and our national fear of nudity. A man could wear the same pair of jeans his entire life, so long as his wife didn’t throw them in a back-alley dumpster while he slept. I had owned the same three pairs of jeans since approximately the seventh grade, when I outgrew my sweatpants.
In that time, the recession (and probably global warming) decimated the jeans industry. All pants now come in hipster styles, which, ironically, don’t allow for hips. They also assume that every man has legs like a prepubescent Cindy Crawford. Which I don’t. But I do have a thirty-three inch waist, which is THE WORST, because apparently we ship all odd-numbered waistlines to overseas troops along with our reject Halloween candy.
When I finally found a pair of jeans that approximately fit me, the denim promptly ripped, because all jeans now come with the same durability as wet crepe paper.
Anyway, the point is, if you follow these Totally Not Miserly Tips for a Flawless Holiday Season, as well as the ones I forgot because I got angry thinking about blue jeans, then you are guaranteed to survive the holidays without financial stress. This is because you won’t have any friends left, and you won’t have to buy them presents. Consequently, you won’t get any fudge, and your old pants will still fit next year. And that’s what really matters.
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