’Twas the Fight Before Christmas: Holiday Spending for Couples

If divergent traditions and expectations are logs on the fire, the symbolic value we individually associate with presents is lighter fluid.

“The feeling of obligation is often so weighty for people, and they feel like they have to meet some external expectation instead of doing what they would like to do—or what they can afford to do,” said Deborah Price, author of The Heart of Money: A Couple’s Guide to Creating True Financial Intimacy and founder of the Money Coaching Institute.

Add impending tax time, travel, and upended schedules to the mix, and it’s no wonder this is the most stressful time of year for so many people.

“A gift is not just a gift, it’s an expression of how I feel about you,” said Price.

Rachel Sussman, a marriage and family therapist in New York City, recommends that couples start talking through their holiday plans even before Thanksgiving. Such discussions should include topics like:

• the cost of travel plans
• whom they’ll be giving gifts to
• how much they have to spend

That means crunching some hard numbers—not just writing a list of people to buy for.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Each family handles holiday hurdles in its own way. Identifying your particular issues is the starting place for getting them solved—and here are some tactics that might help.

Get more specific than being “on the same page”

“I always say: Numbers don’t lie. One person might have a small family and say they’re just going to get a few little gifts for everyone. But you might not have the same representation of what that actually means,” Sussman said, illustrating the point with a real-life account of one woman who bought mini Chanel bags for her three sisters (technically speaking, the bags were small).

The bottom line, according to Sussman: “Set a budget for each family, starting with the question: What do you think is reasonable?”

It’s sound advice, though it can be tricky to apply on an individual level. Alice, a mom of one from the Midwest who asked to be identified with a pseudonym, described her holiday arguments with her husband as an “annual tradition.” The issue? His family is affluent and always buys “super-nice” gifts, while her parents and siblings tend to purchase smaller tokens of affection that never exceed $50 per person.

“It’s hard because [$50 is] the perfect amount to spend for my family, and my mom would be livid if I spent anything more than that,” Alice said. “But other than a framed picture, his family wouldn’t really like anything within that budget. Then I get annoyed because I have to drop $150 on his mom, who already has everything.”

Make sure your holiday budget is holistic—and includes more than just gifts

Heather, who lives in Chicago with her toddler and husband and asked to be identified by her first name only, shared a different kind of holiday conundrum. She remembers seeing an “avalanche” of presents the first year the couple celebrated Christmas with his family. “I didn’t realize that happened outside of movies on the Disney Channel,” Heather said. “It’s too much.”

In the years since, she and her spouse have developed more low-key traditions of their own. The strategy with her three siblings and her parents is that everyone buys one person a gift in the $250 price range; because his family is smaller, they shop for everyone but spend around the same total amount.

Even with a plan in place, they often wind up going over budget because of items they didn’t account for, like expensive ingredients her husband needs when he decides to cook an elaborate meal on Christmas Day, or small gifts for her nieces and nephews that weren’t factored in. “He both knows that they exist and need presents, but [he] doesn’t necessarily stop to do the math in advance,” Heather said.

Communicate up front about how much you’re spending and who’s handling what

As the owners of a restaurant in the English countryside, Brittany Manning—an American expat—and her husband abide by the holiday philosophy of: “If the money is there, we spend it. If it’s not, then everybody gets a little bit less.” Her quarrel with the giving season has more to do with the emotional labor of who shops than with how much it costs.

“Christmas can be more of a chore than anything because it’s our busy season at work,” Manning said. As the chief planner and list maker of their household, she delegates Santa gifts to her husband and handles pretty much everything else herself. “I’ll do [presents] for his parents and family, but he wouldn’t dream of suggesting something to get my mom or dad,” she added.

Manning also expressed a heightened concern about giving and receiving things just to “check a box.” An ocean away, her family is “basically shopping for something within a price range that they feel suitably reflects how much they care, or that they care at all. That’s nice. But I don’t care if they send the kids presents or not, in part because by the time they open all this stuff, they forget about half of it. In this day and age, I’m just finding that really wasteful.”

At the same time, she doesn’t want to offend her family by telling them what to give. Dismantling the more-is-more tradition is tricky business. As Zulkey described it: “You feel like you’re in the position of ‘team less-fun Christmas.’”

However, there’s a lot of appeal in becoming a card-carrying member of that team.

“Kids get all hypered out and then they crash, just like with sugar. We’re patterning them and creating a level of expectations that can develop into entitlement,” Zulkey said.

Her advice: If you do want to scale back on gifts, whether for financial reasons or because of your personal philosophy, make sure you’re up front with everyone who will be affected. “Communication is really key, because then people aren’t surprised by the misalignment of expectations,” she said.

Zulkey has found it also helps to be realistic about the fact that the holidays are tough. “We’ve been better about knowing what our pressure points are and trying to work around it, and I feel much less worked up about it than last year.

“We’ll see, though,” she chirped cheerily. “You never know what kinds of fights we’ll be having next Christmas.”