Set a per-person Christmas gift budget.
Christmas budgets fail in two places. The first is forgetting that a quarter of the spend is not gifts at all — food, decorations, cards, wrapping and travel routinely take 20 to 30% before a single present is bought, so the gift budget is much smaller than the total. The second is treating everyone equally when nobody intends to. Assigning relative weights — immediate family at three units, extended family at 1.5, friends and colleagues at one — divides the gift pot in a way that matches how people actually shop, and gives you three per-person figures to shop against rather than one running total to overshoot.
Christmas Budget Per Person
Gift budget = total x (1 - non-gift share%); units = immediate x 3 + extended x 1.5 + others x 1; per unit = gift budget / units; each tier's amount = per unit x its weight
Typically 20-30%. Food and drink alone is often 15%, with wrapping, cards, decorations and travel making up the rest.
Set the per-person figures before shopping and write them down against names. Overspending almost always happens because there is a total but no per-recipient target.