As the holidays near, my stress levels seem to increase a wild amount for finals, so why should I also be stressing about gifts for my friends and family? To prepare for the holidays, I decided to make a list of some cheap and easy gifts and where to find them.
When I’m tight on cash around the holidays, I get nervous because most gifts that people will like are expensive, especially when there are multiple people to buy gifts for, so knowing a cheap store to get gifts from is the most important part of gift buying.
For a wide selection of cheaper gifts, I will always recommend TJ Maxx. A common stereotype of women is that we’re hard to shop for, but if you know where to look, it isn’t that hard, so here are some gifts I found at TJ Maxx that may work for pretty much any female in your life above the age of 13.
Makeup. Makeup is always a huge hit and at stores similar to TJ Maxx, like Tuesday Morning. There are makeup aisles filled with discounted makeup that is just as nice as name brand items, and sometimes they’ll even have name-brand items for sale there.
You can also never really go wrong with skin care products: girls go crazy for face masks, lotions, chapsticks, everything. Advertising that “it will make you glow” is a sure way to tell it’s probably a solid find, and a lot of places offer skin care products for $10 or less, so go crazy here.
Journals have also made their way back to popularity. Find a journal that looks vintage or has a cute quote on the front and a girl will definitely find a use for it; some people I know even DIY planners out of their journals. Although this DIY is available, planners have still greatly grown in popularity and maybe a planner would be a good thing to start the new year with–a way to try and keep up with that resolution to stay organized. Once again, going to a store like TJ Maxx or even Target, you can find a planner or journal for $10 or less.
And of course, we can’t forget mugs. We all need our coffee and what better gift to give than a cute mug to hold our sustenance in. Mugs of even kind are cheap pretty much anywhere, so this is another category you may be able to go crazy in.
Now for guys, I found the obvious: tools. There are keychains with a little emergency toolkit that I found, and those actually seemed quite useful. But for the guys that are more of the gamer type, it might be cool to get them another cool find from TJ Maxx: a retro mini gamer–this compact console included about 100 minigames on it, and it was $10.
Guys also like to cozy down in the winter, so fuzzy socks can be a good gift for them(also a good gift for a girl ), or even slippers. Another good gift would be a small, Bluetooth speaker for them to use. On the opposite side of a speaker, headphones might be good for guys because they always seem to want more; depending on what brand you get, these can get expensive, but honestly, this gift doesn’t have to be expensive.
