Reply to Present drama--does anyone else's parents do this?

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[quote=Anonymous]I just tell my mom that, at most, the kids can have one large and one small gift from each set of grandparents. Or just one large gift! Or two small! But that's tops. What my mom has a tendency to do is just keep clicking "Buy" on random Amazon crap over the course of a month. And yes, she regularly disregards my suggestions when she asks for them and just gets what she wants or something that has nothing to do with them. She just gets into crazy buying mode.

But I've made it clear: one large gift and one small. We know our kids look forward to presents on Christmas, and we're not scrooges. But we try to emphasize the thoughtfulness behind gifts, and try to keep the focus on a smaller number of gifts but make sure they are thoughtful/needed/dearly wanted, so they reflect the love and attention of people in their lives and not simply the acquisition of a mountain of gifts. We had one Christmas early on where both sets of grandparents went overboard, and watching our kids slowly devolve over the course of the morning -- it was like watching them get an intensely hyper sugar rush only worse because it was also hundreds of dollars of gifts and many of them were just junk I knew would barely hold their interest past the day.

So now, if they send more, I let them know that the excess will either go into a closet to be given on another day (birthday, or a first day of school gift, or just a random treat depending on the size of the item), or to a nearby shelter for women and children. It depends on whether the gift is even appropriate for or of interest to my kid. I don't want to give away a gift that my mom picked out that involved some actual thought and care. But many of them don't or are too young or duplicates of something they already have, etc. Those go to charity.

You have to draw firm lines and enforce them. [/quote]

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