Shop Till You Drop
My mom is a big fan of shopping on “Black Friday.” Although she kicks off her Christmas shopping as early as October, the big month for her to shop around and find the bargains is usually November, and the day after Thanksgiving is the mother of all shopping bargain days.
A lot of stores have special prices on high dollar items to get your Christmas shopping money as early in the day as possible on Black Friday. For example, my mom got word that Best Buy was opening their doors at 4:00 am on Black Friday last year, so she was up and out of the house by 3:15 am for a full day of bargain hunting. At Best Buy she scored big on a digital video camera under $100 and a portable DVD player for under $50. All the big stores will have special deals this year - and if you know about them ahead of time you can plan your whole day around which stores you want to get to early and which can wait until later in the day.
Some of the same stores are now bleeding over into the next week with special deals on “Cyber Monday.” These are deals you can only get online, and the best part of that is there’s no crowds, no parking issues, and they can ship everything to either your house for the gift giving in person or they can ship it to the person’s home or business address for the relatives and friends out of town or who won’t be able to be with you on Christmas for the gift exchange. I’m a big fan of cyber monday and will probably take advantage of the online deals this year and have everything shipped to my parents house so it will all be there when I get home on the Christmas break.