Santa

Day 8 of Gratitude, I'm thankful I get to buy my kids christmas presents.  Its so much fun.  Part of me wants to buy everything!  Every lego game my son wants, and a few more sets.  I want to buy a dress up trunk for my daughter, baby dolls, and a lalaloopsy too. 

 But I'm also thankful for balance. Instead, he is getting one game, and two $5 sets. While my daughter is getting one baby, and one dress up dress.  Not only can I not afford to spend $100 per child, my children don't need that much.  Is it bizarre to be thankful to be struggling through the first year of homeownership, so I can't over do my children's christmas? I think its so important to teach our children self restraint in their wants, so they can learn money management themselves.  I always end up buying more than I plan, so I'm grateful this year, I have an extremely tight budget.
I'm not actually thankful to be broke, but I'm thankful for the moderation it teaches me, and self control that I'm hopefully learning.  The only reason I'm thankful for that though is because I keep studying my conference talks.  If it wasn't for conference I think I would throw a fit and say its no fair.  All the Apostles seem to take turns sharing stories of when they were younger and had to do without or when they parents sacrificed for them on their mission, or something to that effect.  I hoard those stories up, and put them on repeat in my memory.
Sometimes though I'm secretly jealous, everyone was poor in those days, there was no easy money, no wallets full of credit cards.  I've though a lot and I think it probably takes more work today to have self control to be frugal and modest then it did 50 years ago.
You know when we were buying our house, I think people wanted me to be excited.  But I had a hard time, I totally wanted to move, I loved the area, the neighborhood, all of the above, and the house showed lots of potential with some paint, but I couldn't get excited, because all I could think of was, we are going to be so broke! I knew before we ever looked at the house, that we would bleed money the first year we owned a house.  But I'm still thankful for my house.  I'm also thankful for to buy christmas presents.