Merry Christmas! Kill the buffet mentality!

“All you can eat!” “All you can carry!” “All you can get!” Such are our typical goals in consumption, right?

Everywhere we go, we’re greeted by the alluring call of MORE… MORE… MORE!

On the one hand, I realize the major focus of our blog is our financial overhaul, so obviously we want the most bang for our buck. I’ve gotten used to Aldi runs, where we get probably at least 50% more in groceries for what we’d spend at other markets. I love the surprise of how low the bill is every time! We try to maximize gas mileage. We try to eat well for less, filling out meals with bigger portions of beans and rice and vegetables and less meat.

However, the flip side of this more-more-more mentality is so dangerous! Do we really need more clothes? More kitchen gadgets? More home decorations or tech devices or dinners out or entertainment?

We lose our ability to enjoy the present when we’re constantly wanting more, looking ahead to the Next Big Thing. It reminds me of our two-year-old watching Octonauts. Whenever an episode gets to the final song, he starts asking, “Is there one more Octo-donks coming?” He misses out on the end of his show because he’s worried about whether we’ll turn it off.

We’re working on this default: the ever-present Desire to Get More. In order to get closer to an early semi-retirement and financial security, we need more savings and investments, but less spending and less stuff. The stupid debts for school and other things are going to be GONE by a year from now. (Yay!) We hope a lot of other things weighing us down will be gone, too. Seems like every couple of months, we (meaning Nate, mostly) go through all the crap in our basement and closets and weed out carloads of it. I swear, I have no clue where it all comes from. I think it’s a storage magic that makes you like stuff less every time you look at it. So when we cleared out boxes of books, clothes, and miscellaneous crap last summer, we thought we only kept essentials. Now, in December, when we see what’s left, we find we see even more junk where we used to see value.

All the Mountains of Useless Crap help provide extra motivation for avoiding unnecessary shopping. If I’ve finally gotten things back to a manageable amount, why would I want to go out and buy MORE Useless Crap? So I can use it for a little while only to get rid of it a few months or a year later? No thank you!

Christmas is now over, and our two little boys have been enjoying a great time in our household. But it isn’t due to piles and piles of gifts that took hours to open. We gave them a few presents, sure. It was a blast to watch them rip open packages and so encouraging when they loved their gifts. But we also ate special meals together, like Cornish hens on Christmas Eve and snowman pancakes Christmas morning. We decorated our tree together when Grandma and Grandpa visited a week ago. We delivered homemade shortbread and toffee to our neighbors. We watched tons of Christmas shows on Netflix (and while the kiddos napped, we caught a few episodes of Z Nation and Clone Wars).

We want to learn contentment ourselves, while passing that ability on to our boys. If they grow up with a few special toys they really love instead of hundreds of items they’ll never play with, they’ll appreciate those gifts all the more. Quite a few of their gifts came as hand-me-downs from the older cousins, too. They’re little–they don’t care if toys are new or not!

Little dude playing happily with a toy we received used from a sister-in-law and wrapped up for Christmas morning!

Here, our own Buddy the Elf enjoys exploring cabinets and doesn’t care about expensive toys!

We won’t be hitting the post-Christmas sales today. Nothing out there that we need. We may be tempted, but we’re aiming to be thankful for all we have.

Merry Christmas, everyone!