Gift card madness!

And also a look back on a year in Witches

We have a drawer in our house full of gift cards that our kids have accrued over the years, making me feel guilty whenever I open it.

This collection is thanks to faraway relatives who don’t always know what our kids want or already have, local but busy loved ones who understandably feel it will be more sensible for kids to buy what they want, and grandparents who are just plain indulgent.

I never know exactly when and how it’s time to use these things, so I stash them in the drawer after we receive them where they sit unused.

It doesn’t feel right to say, “Here you go, buy $50 of whatever you want on Amazon!” to a child, especially after he’s already been love-bombed with gifts. They have Barnes & Noble gift cards, too, and it feels strange to tell them to go ahead and buy books when we have a library and indie bookstores in town (or to let them use it to buy even more Legos—I see you B&N! Secretly-being-a-toystore-ass place.) And in terms of supervision, I don’t want just to hand them the cards and let them run wild online (despite my son telling me with, yearning in his voice, how much he hopes to use a promo code someday), and I don’t want to sit next to them on the computer while they poke around and I double-check to make sure that whatever they’re buying is the real deal.

And I’m going to be brave and admit something possibly stupid to you: up until recently, I wasn’t sure whether or not you could regift gift cards.

In my new era of tackling tiny tasks I used to ignore but now confront since I’m saving so much time not reading the news or social media, I decided to ask Lindsey Stanberry, financial writer/witch and editor of

The Purse

, what she would make of this supply. Maybe her advice will help you if you also have a child with a small gift card fortune that you don’t know what to do with.

I wrote her:

OK, so we have this abundance of gift cards. We need to consolidate this, put this to use, give some of this away, figure out who gets what to spend and have it make sense. Help! What would you do to address this, especially before the holidays? In a perfect world, I would like to involve the boys in this discussion, but I’m also not above just making some executive decisions. They are nine and 12. (Can you easily regift cards? Because maybe I could donate some of these Barnes & Noble ones to the school and they wouldn’t even notice.)

Here was her reply!

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If I were you, I would probably regift most of these.

Do you give gifts when you go to birthday parties? I don’t see any reason why you couldn't just regift to your kids’ friends. (Or use them to buy gifts for the friends.) I do that with gifts we receive that I know my kid won’t really like, or if we get duplicates. I just make a mental note of who gave the gift, so we don’t accidentally essentially return to the original giver. So far, so good! And it’s been a while since I had to buy a gift in the store, which is wonderful! Sometimes, I’ll offer to buy my kid a replacement gift of something he wants, but often time he forgets.

I think donating the B&N gift cards to the school is a brilliant idea!

Regarding looping in your kids, yes, I think it’s always good to include them in the process, because ultimately these gifts do belong to them. And I always feel like sort of a shitty parent when I try to get one over on my kid. I might air on the side of being too honest, LOL, but sometimes I’m just like, “You have more than you could ever possibly use, so I’m going to share this with others who don’t have as much.” Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t!

If they want to keep/spend them, could you work together to give yourself a deadline to do so? Like, “We’re going to go to movies before Thanksgiving and visit the Museum of Ice Cream by XYZ date?” And for the more product-based ones, like the B&N gift cards, maybe you create a calendar invite for mid-March or some other random time when there’s not a lot of gift-giving/receiving going on to cash in the more toy-focused cards.

One more idea that I sometimes do, is with Amazon or Target gift cards, I'll “buy” from my kid, trading him cash for the gift card. Then I use the gift card on something practical (toilet paper!), and he can “save” the money for something else he wants to buy in the future.

*

Thank you

Lindsey Stanberry

! I already used one, with the boys’ approval, to buy four pairs of winter gloves, two to keep and two to donate. A couple cards will go to the teachers and maybe the postal carrier. And maybe, finally, in 2025, my dear son will get to achieve his dream of scratching off a card and entering a tiny number in an online box. 🤞

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Evil Witches in 2024

I’m tired. I bet you are, too! But I do like looking back at seeing what I worked on over the last 12 months to allow myself the brief treat of remembering I actually did stuff and didn’t just fuck around.

If you missed an issue, just signed up for the newsletter or are debating whether or not to subscribe, here are some of my (and your) favorite issues from the last year. Most of these issues are free, but perhaps a few of the subscriber-only ones may tempt you:

Some general faves:

Witches on running, motherhood and aging

Goodbye outside world: I guess I’m just gonna spend more time with my family now.

Wedding registry items that were a good call

Young adults on their childhood smartphone and social media practices

Explaining a parent’s big illness to kids

What’s actually helpful: a guide for new grandparents

Wisdom from moms who have had several kids over a span of time

What to say when kids ask about people they see in crisis

Topics that got people talking!

No amount of cherishing your kid now will let you skip feeling melancholy later

The wisdom we attempt to pass on at baby showers

Things we don’t do, by Kathleen Donahoe

Am I definitely telling you to get a facelift? Yes.

A thing + another thing recipes

Tasty threads for subscribers only:

How we celebrated our milestone birthdays

Boring untrendy skincare

If you have a paid job, do you like it?

Witchy celebrity encounters

Paid subscriber posts that are just shit-talking basically:

The dad who assumed I was leaving my husband because I didn’t go to every kids’ baseball game

How to get old stubborn parents to consider hearing aids

When you’re trying to be a hands off parent but another mom says nah

Previously paid subscriber only but now unlocked: Don’t believe the bedtime hype!!

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End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what we’re all about. Our Instagram, curated by Carly O., lives here, and the Evil Witches archives live here.

If you are not a paid subscriber, consider joining us! The free version of the newsletter is crossing its hands over its chest and leaning back into its coffin til early/mid-January, but I’ll drop a few paid posts/threads til then. If you want a good reason to become a paid subscriber, you can do so at a tasty discount anytime for the rest of the year.

And if you are a paid subscriber, thank you so much for supporting this work. Getting paid to put out the kind of parenting content I always wanted to see is a privilege, but even better is looking at how amazing and giving and funny this community is. We are raising kids which is important work blah blah blah blah blah, but truly, look at what a cool group of people we are.

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One witchy thing

What happens when your kids work on a gingerbread house at a family party without you supervising at all: a gingerbread crime scene: