NC Angler Fishing Blogs

Its tough to follow NCangler's last Blog post, as it should be!

I wanted to share a couple things from this Christmas that made it a memorable "Ten Dollar Christmas" for me.

$10 doesn't go very far. Two people can get filled up at certain fast food restaurants for $10. You could get small bag of groceries for $10. Or a little more than three gallons of gas. Or, to put it in fishing terms, 1 bag of Gulp and a handful of jig heads.

Here's two $10 Christmas gifts that showed me how $10 can be worth a lot more than we usually think.



My grandmother is in her 80s, lives halfway across the country and I only get to see her about every 10 years or so. But she never fails to squeeze some kind of Christmas gift out of her fixed income budget. This year she's stopped driving and instead of shopping she sent $50 to my Mom here in NC and asked her if she could do something for each of the "kids" (5 of us - grandkids and great-grandkids from teenagers to 40+ yrs old).

We could have donated it to some worthy cause - like a Salvation Army bucket or a check to the Food Bank. But those weren't the directions we got from "Gram" - we were to get $10 gifts as her way of showing us her love at Christmas. So we came up with a new tradition that I think may stick.

We decided to meet at a Target store near my folks house at 4:30 on Christmas Eve, before our normal dinner & family gift exchange and do a 15 minute shopping trip with our $10. This year we decided each one would buy for themselves. The store wasn't empty, but was getting close, so we didn't have the normal Christmas crowds to compete with. There was some stress from having to make a decision that fit the $10 budget and 15 minute window, but nothing like shopping for somebody else.

I decided that Gram would want me to have at least one fishing lure under the tree this year, so I started in their ever-shrinking fishing dept. I picked a clown colored Husky Jerk for $4.99 and then added a $5 DVD that I can watch with the kids. (So I cheated a little with the tax - over $10 total - but how can you tax a grandmother's love?).

It might sound a little silly but we had a blast and each one got something small but meaningful for themselves. We spent a lot of time thinking about our Gram O, and we'll talk about this Christmas shopping trip over and over in future Christmases.



The next $10 Christmas present came from my Mom. Its a home-made "ticket" to the Raleigh Bass & Saltwater Fishing show made by taping the Newspaper ad and a $10 bill to a piece of card stock. Hard to beat for Christmas creativity!



After all the packages were opened, I had received most of the things on my Christmas list (and a few from way, way off the list - is anybody else a "Guitar Hero" this year?). I even got a Chatterbait kit and found a couple of Shad Raps in my stocking, so I needn't have worried about a lure-free Christmas. But its the two $10 Christmas presents that stand out in my memory.