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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!

Deals for Busy Moms This Holiday Season

Check out This Week’s Deals!

About this TwitterMoms Blogging Program

To celebrate the premiere of Dora’s Christmas Carol, Nickelodeon and TwitterMoms want to hear your favorite holiday activities that you like to do with your kids! For your chance to win a $100 gift card go Here and check it out.

Here is my list of Fun Holiday Activities that I enjoy doing with my kids:

1. Thanksgiving Day – This really depends on whether or not we go anywhere. Sometimes we travel to spend the day with family in NJ. But for the past few years, we have been sticking close to home due to me being pregnant. When we stay home, I do the cooking – turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn, and usually a store bought pie (I am not much of a baker). And since my husband is home for the holiday we spend the rest of the day getting all the Christmas stuff out and together as a family we start decorating.

2. Christmas Music – We hardly listen to music in our home for some reason (probably because of all the chaos with the kids, etc) but after Thanksgiving we always have the radio station playing that has 24 hour Christmas music. My husband LOVES Christmas music and it makes me happy to see him humming and singing along.

3. Christmas Movies – We have a nice collection of Christmas movies and we spend the month before Christmas watching them over and over. We have lots of different Christmas shows for the kids like Barney Christmas, Bob the Builder Christmas, Mickey Christmas. It is special because this is the only time we watch them and then they get put away again once Christmas is over.

4. Christmas Eve – My parents started a tradition for my brother and I when we were kids that we could open one present the night before Christmas. Now we do the same with our kids. So, after we get home from our church’s special Christmas Eve Service, we allow them all to open one small gift.

5. Christmas Day – I like to keep things very organized and in order as far as gift opening goes. I don’t allow my children to go and open their gifts right when they wake up. We actually have breakfast first and then read the Christmas story together. And since we don’t keep the gifts under the tree, we then take all the gifts out of the closets and put them under the tree. Each child has their own pile of gifts. We then pass them out one at a time so we can all watch each other opening a gift.

So, there ya have it! Those are some of my familiy’s holiday traditions. Be sure to stop by Here at Twitter Moms and enter YOUR 5 Favorite Holiday Activities for your chance to win some great prizes!

Watch Dora’s Christmas Carol Adventure Dec. 6 on Nickelodeon

Favorite Holiday Activities with Kids