HIGH CLASS RECESSIONISTA

Adding to my previous post about unique ways to wrap holiday gifts… something fun to do if you remember to do the morning after Christmas (at the beginning and end of Hanukkah is great too!), you will have plenty of wrapping material for next year’s gifts!

Go to the convenience store and stock up on all of the newspapers from that day. Living as close as I do to New York City, I have access to a plethora of material and newspapers to pick from.  Newspapers from the day after Christmas always have images of the balloons and floats from the Macy’s Parade, along with cool holiday advertisements and stories.  You can use everything down to the holiday comics!

Store your newspaper stack until the holidays come around again and you will no longer have to buy wrapping paper like everyone else!

Most people would look at this headline and overlook it because they already know how to prepare a bird…  I am NOT going to talk about preparing the Thanksgiving turkey.

If you are the person in your family hosting and cooking for the day, where everyone is placed at the table is just as important as all of the fixins’.  You can use tons of things you already have at home to make unique, creative and FUN place settings for your guests.  

One of the cutest ideas I’ve seen around is the ice cream cone cornucopia.  Write your guest’s name with decorator’s icing along the side of the sugar cone. You must let the cone dry before you start handling it!  Fill the sugar cone with wrapped chocolates and other small candies…(skittles, jellybeans, gummi bears and runts work well with the chocolate.)  When you put them by each guest’s plate, be sure to drop some more of the chocolate, skittles and runts mixture around the opening of the cone…

We’ve all received gifts on holidays or birthdays that we don’t always like, but obviously it’s the thought that counts so you cannot be rude in any sort of way.  In instances like that, why not give that gift that you may have not wanted to someone who actually does!? And obviously, there are indeed some guidelines to follow.  

Let me start off first by saying at no point in time, EVER, do you want to re-gift food, cakes, cookies, pies, etc.  There is an exception to this statement however…  If you have guests that bring a dessert over to your house and you already have that same dessert on your table, remove YOUR duplicate and display the other dessert your guests made so whatever it is can be enjoyed by everyone there.  You then can take your dessert and yes, bring it to another holiday party later that evening..

Perfumes, lotions, bath items and so on are a little tricky as well.  I’m going to put the general rule out there, that if the item you plan on re-gifting is in this category, do not let more than one year go by before re-gifting.  Perfumes tend to have an alcohol scent when left too long and lotions can separate inside the bottle and fade in color…You do not want to ever give a gift that looks dingy or dirty or with stains on the packaging or discoloration with the actual item itself.  

 Those hat, scarf, gloves combinations that you may have gotten two of last year are great and useful items to re-gift. Big blankets or throws for your sofa are other items great for re-gifting.  My sister-in-law has tons of brand new blankets in her living room that people give her all the time.  She would be a great candidate for re-gifting a blanket to someone this Christmas!   

Items should always be clean with no dust or stains on them and keep in mind, everything that you re-gift should have some sort of tag on it unless it was handmade… People do not want to think that you just pulled a sweater you don’t wear from your closet and put it in a bag with tissue paper for them.

Whatever you choose to do this holiday season, whether you spend $5,000 on gifts, or you are like me, someone who doesn’t have access to that infamous tree with 100’s hanging from it…Re-gifting is the Recessionista way of life!

High Class Recessionista incorporates tips, ideas, advice for the trendy female on any sort of budget.  There isn’t a tree outside where I have free reign to pluck 100’s from, so I’ve created a place to essentially, well, be creative…  Whether that means organizing a closet to find new pieces or letting you hear some hot music that I may be listening to…  I’ve got lots going on in this brain of mine to share and I’m also looking for some like minds to bounce great ideas off of.   I’ll always be searching for the latest trends and then ways that anyone on any sort of budget can take advantage of them!

Wow, there are so many things going thru my head right now it’s not even funny. The messy bedroom I need to clean, some clothes that need to be put where they belong (yes, even my closet needs to be whipped back into shape quite often!), baking ideas for my fam’s annual cookie swap ( my idea is pineapple empanadas…) and many more thoughts to even want to list…

With holidays coming back around, are your feeling more stressed than usual, in a hurry to get everything accomplished before the bird hits the table or before Santa wiggles down the chimney?

One of the best things that I’ve started doing in the past few years is to reuse my wrapping paper…If you truly know how long it takes to wrap holiday gifts, then you can sympathize with the point I’m trying to make here.. Reuse last year’s wrapping paper or find another creative way to wrap.. Using old newspapers and magazines are great for gift wrapping.  You can even get a little more creative and cut up an old tee shirt to make an even more unique cloth wrapping.

You DO NOT need to keep spending your hard earned money on nothing but clothes! You can totally re-vamp your wardrobe in a few simple steps!

1.  Organize every piece of clothing you own BY COLOR.  It is time consuming, however once you know where everything you own is, you can then cut down your prep time each morning…(especially if you lay out your clothes the night before.)

2.  Once you have organized by color, you need to put tank tops together, tee shirts together, jeans together, skirts together and so on.  Again, everything ranging from lightest to darkest in color. 

3.  Now that you know where ALL of your clothes are, you can begin to put different pieces together that you would normally never think of wearing at the same time.  This gives off the illusion that you’ve just purchased an entirely new wardrobe of clothes… when at the very most, you’ve purchased a few staples to tie your pieces together completely.  

Note:  I actually did this to my own closet about six months ago.  It did take an entire weekend to place everything where it needed to go, but the amount of time that I actually save each morning figuring out what to wear is astonishing.  You have no idea how easy and fast it is to get dressed in the morning, whether I am going to work Monday thru Friday or if I am just putting on jeans on Saturday…