Easter may not garner the same fanfare as Christmas—often seen as its overlooked sibling—but it still brings the joy of the Easter Bunny, colorful eggs, and cherished traditions that make the season special.
But unless I accidentally bought literal golden eggs, I still can’t quite wrap my head around how my Easter shopping — mostly spent on food — has somehow exceeded my Christmas shopping by almost double! Just to be clear, I’m excluding the cost of Christmas gift-giving from this comparison. But even so, in what world does Easter spending outpace Christmas shopping? It almost feels like the Easter Bunny raided my wallet while I wasn’t looking.
Let’s go over what I did — or didn’t do — to try and make sense of this surprisingly high Easter bill. To start with, we decided to give our mother a well-deserved break and skip the traditional meal we usually prepare for both Easter and Christmas. Sure, that meal is absolutely delicious, but it’s also notoriously time-consuming — often taking hours upon hours over the span of several days to get it just right. Instead, and despite this April being one of the coldest we have experienced in years, we opted to make BBQ. I love BBQ, and it will be our first for the season, but this may have been the first issue.
BBQ Overspending
I definitely overdid it! I went to three different places to buy food for our Easter BBQ. On top of that, my brother also picked up some specialty items like steaks, souvlaki sticks, and more. Altogether, I estimate we cooked well over 75 pounds of meat that day, which cost us hundreds of dollars.
The good news is that we didn’t just feed our immediate family—we also hosted family friends and relatives. In fact, we gave many of them extra food to take home, and we still have enough leftovers to feed ourselves for the entire week. So, in a way, it almost paid for itself. Still, the truth is we bought too much and could have easily gotten by with half.
We also overbought groceries—especially breakfast items that we don’t normally eat. These are more seasonal things that we typically get around Christmas, Easter, and other special holidays. I felt like there was a momentum of spending, and one thing let to another. In fact, I was much more concerned about getting all the right items for Easter and much less about how much I was spending. Looking back at some of my grocery bills, I bought so many similar items, as if one is not enough and had to get a variety of each.
Correcting Things
It’s human nature to overdo things, and then try to overcorrect afterward—that’s exactly what I did. Since Easter is just a one-day event and not a whole season like Christmas, I suddenly found myself with way too much food.
Sure, we could have just kept it and eaten it over time, but I realized that many of the items we bought are things we rarely consume. It made more sense to try and return them to the grocery store. So that’s what I did. I managed to get some money refunded to my credit card—not nearly as much as I spent overall, but still a decent amount. Plus, returning those items turned out to be a win for our diet too. Now we don’t have to worry about consuming all that extra food we didn’t really need.
This was a good lesson on how to be intentional about spending and not make it an afterthought. When you are running from place to place, trying to check off every item off of your list, as if it December Christmas shopping, it easy to lose track of your budget and overspend.