Getting organised with Christmas gift guides

_{Some items have been gifted}

I love looking at catalogues at this time of year.  There’s just something special about Christmas gift guides that gets me in the mood for the festive season – even if I don’t ever buy anything from them! Although I try hard not to get excited about Christmas too early, I am a bit of a kid when it comes to all things festive, and I just can’t help picking up stacks of Christmas gift guides when they start appearing in the shops. Add to that the fact that festive catalogues start dropping through my letterbox from the middle of October and you’ve got a recipe for an over-excited adult with restless fingers that just want to be flicking through those pages.

This weekend was one of those rare occasions that I found myself with a couple of hours of spare time and a festive feeling floating around inside me. So I snuggled down with a cup of tea (who are we kidding, it was a pot of tea) and methodically went through my stack of gift guides, making notes and marking my favourites with Post-it Index markers. Now, I don’t want any of my gift recipients to flip through my xmas catalogues and straight away see what I’ve earmarked for them, so I’ve avoided putting name labels on the tabs. Instead, I have put an index in my diary of which colour Post-it refers to whom – this head’s not just a hat stand eh?! 

Not only was I shopping for parents, siblings, in-laws and friends, but I was also shopping for myself. Let’s face it, without a gentle nudge in the right direction hubby may well buy me a vacuum cleaner for Christmas (ok we do need a new one, but that’s not the point!). So I thought I’d give him a helping hand by adding in these pretty pink Post-its on the things I simply must have.

Plus, I’ve gone one step further and have been sending him cheeky photos of the products that I want with a big red arrow pointing to it, so he knows what to buy and even what it looks like! Is that too cheeky or is it very helpful?? It’s a lesson that I learnt from my friend at Glitter Daze blog – she always read magazines with a stack of sticky-tabs to hand so that she could mark the outfits and cosmetics she liked and then pass on the magazine to her housemates to get their opinions before making the purchase. That was in the days before camera phones so my modern solution to living miles away from my uni friends is to take a snap and post it to Instagram or Facebook to get a second opinion – or in this instance to drop a subtle hint to the hubster about what would make me very happy this Christmas!

I really enjoy this part of the run up to Christmas and find myself repeating the ritual year after year. I hope I’m not alone in the joy I find from browsing through Christmas guides – please leave me a comment below and let me know if you do it too!

Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂