It’s amazing how a single day can change all of your plans.  That’s part of the reason that I’ve made the consistent pitch of getting out of debt and having an emergency fund.  It’s because the future is not guaranteed, and at any moment you can find yourself in a situation you didn’t contemplate wondering what to do next.

For some time, my wife and I have kept up a Christmas Savings fund.  At one point in time we were using an official Christmas Club account, but since its savings rate wasn’t much better than my online saving account through HSBC, we consolidated it.

We have saved $50 every paycheck for the entire year, so we have plenty of money on hand for Christmas.  However, that was before I got the news that I’d no longer have a job by November 14th.  That means that unless I get another job soon, it may be more important to keep that savings (or a majority of it) to keep paying the bills.

So, now we’re wondering what to do for our family and our extended family.  We may end up keeping the one big purchase we made as a family gift—and keep it simple.  We were already looking at just getting clothing or something practical (like most families in this day in age, I believe that our kids have way too many toys).  So what’s left is getting gifts for our family.

That’s where I’m going to be paying attention to 2008 thanksgiving ads and we’ll be making sure to see what WalMart specials  will be coming around.  Last year my brother waited in line and got a few things, but you always have to be concerned about quality when it comes to the deals.

In any case, should I not have a job in December (or depending where the job is!) we could find ourselves with a very strange Christmas in terms of previous years.

But the greatest gift doesn’t come in a package—it came in the terms of God’s dear Son, born to die for the sins of the World.