Our 2025 Holiday Spending Breakdown: $1,152 for a Family of Four
Confession. We didn’t actually budget for the holidays this past year 😬. Should we have? Maybe. But after nearly a decade of actively tracking our finances, we’ve developed pretty solid instincts about our spending. Having ample savings also plays a huge role in our lack of a holiday budget. If we spend beyond what our monthly income can handle, we can pull from savings (specifically our gift savings). However, if our savings wasn’t built up we’d definitely create a budget for the holidays. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend winging it if you’re newer to budgeting, but it worked for us this past year… and we’ll probably do the same next holiday season.
We’ve built up our savings with unplanned or additional cash from gifts, tax refunds, interest income from savings, and home sales (home sales and interest have probably been the biggest contributors over the years). We’ve also used sinking funds to build up our savings. The gift savings sinking fund is fully funded at the moment. We can dip into it if we need to when we’re buying gifts, but I try to just use our monthly income to cover costs if possible, which is what happened this past holiday season. No dipping into savings for 2025.
To track our holiday spending in Monarch, I added a “Holidays 2025” tag to any holiday-related transactions. After the holidays were done, I grouped them into five categories: family gifts (me, Mike, E, and H), extended family gifts, friend and teacher gifts, holiday cards, and holiday events and activities.
Here’s the holiday spending breakdown:
Family gifts (me, Mike, E, H): $788 (68.4%)
Extended family gifts: $111 (9.7%)
Holiday events/activities: $114 (9.9%)
Friends/teacher gifts: $74 (6.4%)
Holiday cards: $65 (5.7%)
Total: $1,152
One small caveat: holiday meals aren’t reflected here, those got folded into our regular grocery spending, so the actual total is probably a little higher.
According to the National Retail Federation (didn’t know this existed until I wrote this post), Americans planned to spend almost $900 per person on holiday spending in 2025. Families with children planned to spend about $750 on gifts, specifically. They didn’t specify if that number was per person or overall. At any rate, we certainly spent well under $900 per person. And we spent just over $750 on gifts for our family of four, but still well under $750 per person.
How we approach gift-giving
We keep gift giving pretty simple. Mike and I don’t buy gifts for each other, we each just buy a few things we actually want. At this point in our lives (i.e., young kid chaos), neither of us really enjoys the gift giving process. Removing gift giving from our task list takes a lot of the stress out of trying to find gifts for each other and ensures we spend our money on things we actually want. This past year we did make a small wish list for the girls to give them some helpful ideas as they love gift giving.
We typically do one bigger gift per person. This year, Mike and I did a joint gift: the REP Fitness Adjustable Kettlebell. Fitness equipment is where we tend to splurge. This one was definitely worth the cost and feels very reasonable considering you’re getting 5 different kettlebell weights. It takes us from about 35 lbs all the way up to about 52 lbs (or 16 to 24 kg). We both use it regularly. We also have REP’s adjustable dumbbells, and love them too. E’s big gift was a Kindle. H is still young enough that a big-ticket gift wasn’t really on her radar so we just did smaller gifts for her.
Extended family gifts are minimal, and we don't do much beyond our immediate circle.
Looking ahead to next holiday season
This is the first time I’ve tracked holiday spending this granularly, and I’m glad I did. It’ll be a really useful benchmark for the 2026 holiday season, both for setting expectations and for deciding if anything is worth adjusting.
