I must confess I love watching Greg and Chris on this BBC programme. I think I'm doing as much as I can to save money on food but I do pick up the odd useful tip here and there. The recurring theme seems to be that people think they don't have the time or skills to cook from scratch and that they'll actually spend more on ingredients if they do. Enter Greg and Chris to prove otherwise.
This week's Christmas special of Eat well for less has caused a bit of a ripple in frugal blogland! The family featured spent £1400 on food for the festive period. So here's my confession. In my previous life I used to spend that amount of money. Over Christmas we hosted the Christmas day meal for the whole family, many of them staying overnight and spending Boxing Day with us too. We would have friends for dinner between Christmas and New Year. We would have drinks and nibbles parties. So we'd easily spend around that amount BUT we could afford it. We chose to splash the cash and share with friends and family.
But as you know from my previous post about unplugging Christmas I wasn't happy with it.
Once again this year I'm using my Nectar points to fund Christmas. I have over £90 worth! That's more than enough to buy the Christmas meal and lots of foodie treats (GF stuff is expensive!!) and buy plenty of things to donate to my local food bank. Win win!!
We watched the program on catch up, and like you I recognised a part of the old me, I grew up in a huge family and we often had 20 people in our house for Christmas, Mum would fill every bit of space with food, she would cook from scratch as did all our mum's. But I got used to having piles of food, which we struggled to eat after Christmas. Now we buy just what we need.
ReplyDeleteI do enjoy that programme and yes, it gets a lot of stick in blogland, BUT it does help a lot of folk with the tips and by showing just how easy it is to make things that lots of us bloggers know how to do, so I find myself defending it time and time again.
ReplyDeleteWe all have to learn sometime and from somewhere and if it takes programmes like these then I for one am all for them. It's entertaining, makes some of us gasp at the lack of knowledge for sure, but it helps, really helps a lot of people to make huge savings and learn new things.
As for buying lots for Christmas, I say each to their own, if you can afford it, as you used to be able to, then there is nothing fundamentally wrong in splurging. I only get upset at the families on benefits who go all out buying their children the latest technology etc and getting themselves ingto serious debt for years to come. There is too much expectation that we HAVE to have it all, it's ONE day and we should have what we can afford and enjoy what we have.
Sorry to ramble on and on ... ;-)
Heavens, those people did spend a lot. We buy one extra bag of salad stuff and a bottle of wine. I love the bring a plate our family does, no stress at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of 'food' programmes so I've not seen this. I've always cooked from scratch anyway and the only overspend we might do over Christmas is on these darned tins of Roses etc! I cannot resist them and at the moment, Big T has two tins of Quality Street for £6 - how could I not!! We now have a chocolate mountain at home and not enough people to share them with lol. I agree with Sue, to each his own and if you can afford it spend as you please its the ones who feel they have to get into debt at this time of year I feel sorry for. Anyway, enjoy your scaled down Christmas and good news for your job situation, thats a lovely Christmas present! x
ReplyDeleteVery much agree with Sue on the each to their own. I remember there was a certain person on the CL forum who was always judging other peoples' shopping trollies with a really holier than thou attitude, made my blood boil. People should never be judged, you don't know their story. let folk be. If they want to splash their money at Christmas then that's fine by me. Lord knows there's enough misery to keep everyone going for the rest of the year. Not everyone copes the same under peer pressure. Live and let live I say.
ReplyDeleteI did see the programme - was delighted to see the girl realise that she could make more meals from what she would have thrown in the bin. Agreed about the cheap coffee though!
I didn't see that episode, but I am happy to confess we used to spend like the people I've seen on previous shows. Happily and oddly it wasn't all that hard to change when the decision to change was made.
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