Twittermoms and Staples are having a contest. They want us Bloggers to post about our Savvy Shopping Tips, Money Saving Ideas, Top Gift Ideas and Time Saving Tips.  I decided to join in and so can you!  You might just win some great prizes!

I decided to write about “Saving Time and Money during the Busy Holiday Season”.  Here are a few tips that have helped make things a little easier for me concerning the Christmas holiday.

1.  Christmas Gift List. Asking your friends and family for a list of what they might want for Christmas will help take the guess work out of shopping.  Some people are more difficult to buy for than others.  So, a list to refer to can help so you are not walking around the store or surfing the web aimlessly.

2.  Shop Online. This is a great way to save time.  You do have to pay for shipping, but if you are like me and most stores take about 20 or 30 minutes to get to – you still wind up having to pay for gas, so the shipping may not be as big of  deal.  I also like to find online coupon codes for the different stores I am shopping at.  You can often find coupons for free shipping or 10% off.  I actually posted recently on this very subject – check it out: Save Money by using Coupon Codes when Ordering Online.

3.  Order Photo Christmas Cards Online. This is a great gift which I always do each year.  We try to take a really nice family picture and then I upload it online to whatever company has the best deal at the time.  I have a large list of people that usually is around 100.  I used to do all the cards by hand – shopping for the perfect card, printing the pictures, writing inside the card, hand writing each address, putting the postal stamp, and licking the envelope.  This was a LOT of work and extremely time consuming.  So, a few years back, I decided to save myself time and money and go with the cards that could be ordered online.  Another great way to save time is to create a labels list for all of your addresses so that instead of hand writing them, you just print them out and stick them on.  I really need to stop procrastinating and do that!

4.  Watch the Christmas Movies on TV. I am not sure if you would consider this saving money, but in my home, we are big movie renters.  We also LOVE Christmas movies.  But the great thing about the holidays is that most of the great Christmas movies will show on TV at some time or another.  I was thinking how neat it would be to use our new recorder device to actually record some of the movies and put them on cd.  I would have to edit out the annoying commercials of course, but it is something that would be great so that we could watch the movies anytime.  (No we don’t have Tivo yet).    Oh, and we still need to go to Radio Shack and pick up this adapter cord to even use out video recorder machine.  Will have to get on hubby about that. 

Well, those are just a few things that I can think of that might help someone time and money during this Christmas season.  Be sure to stop by Twitter Moms to check out more great ideas and even enter a post of your own!

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