Here we realized pretty quickly that there wasn't room for all the new stuff we had bought.

Last year we decided to try something new. We gave the kids stocking stuffers, and each got two small gifts. Then there were a few family presents. The best gift though was a little coupon book of 12 activities that we could do together, one for each month of the year.

We sat down Christmas night and assigned one to each month of the year. Some of them were a little more money, but one of them was going to the park with their dad, and one was going to get ice cream together. It was a HUGE success. We did all of them. We made great memories, and the kids loved having something to look forward to every month. We still did other family outings too. But they are still pretty young and they love having one day a month when they know that they're getting all of our attention to go do something fun together. We're repeating it this year.

The activities this year that they're most excited about are their dad taking a day off of work to do whatever they want to do, mini-golfing, going to the water park, and going out to dinner together, kids pick the restaurant.

I recognize that as they get older this might have to be altered in some way (maybe bigger quarterly activities), but we really want to try and keep doing Christmas this way indefinitely. They each got two gifts today, and a gift card from their grandparents. Each of them independently thanked us profusely for a great Christmas "and all these gifts," and one of them tried to give the gift card to us, because he doesn't "need anything else."