This time of year isn't about gifts, it isn't about breaking our budget either. We try really hard as a family to keep things about celebrating the birth of Jesus during this time of year and being consistent with our children.

While our focus is Jesus, giving each other Christmas gifts is fun, and a great way to show appreciation and love for others. Today I thought I'd share with you how we tackle this in our home and make things really simple during this time of year.

Let me start with what we do for our children. For our kids we do 4 gifts, this is something I read about on a blog when Ava was just a baby and we've adopted it ever since. It has worked great for our family, let me share with you about it and then tell you why we love it and why it works for us.

Each of our kids get:

Something to wear.
Something to read.
Something they want.
Something they need.

I will say when Ava was an infant we still used the wear and read gifts, but the other two we bought her two toys. Now that she's older she's able to express a "want" a little bit better. Here's a few reasons why I love this model; first of all the obvious is that it keeps the focus not on how many or how much you get. It also helps us to think of a realistic budget and plan accordingly. As our children get older this will help them really decide what they "want." This gift system has worked really well for us, and we love the idea of picking meaningful gifts for our children based on these 4 things.

This year we're starting a new tradition. Ava decided that she'd like to get her brother a gift. We thought it would be really neat to begin a tradition of each of them buying gifts for the other sibling.

For our extended families we do a few things, depending on the year. However, my siblings and I with our spouses/significant others always do a gift exchange. This works great for us since there's so many of us, and it's fun to do this from year to year. For my parents again we usually all go in on a big gift for them.

Also for our parents my husband and I get them photo books or calendars with pictures from our year. I love giving personal gifts like these to family.

These are just some simple ideas that work for our family, I'd love to hear what you do during the holidays for gift giving. Tell me in the comments below.

Andrea Worley