By Phil Stott

So after writing a couple of weeks ago about the challenges and advantages of taking it easy with gift spending over the festive season, I have a couple of things to report. First is that my daughter Maeve (a one-year-old) received a much bigger Christmas than either my wife or I anticipated. And the second is that, although I've broken my budget -- something that happens every year -- it's not been by as much as I might have expected, given the amount and quality of gifts we've accumulated.

There are a few reasons that Maeve's first "real" Christmas has escalated from one main gift towards the super-sized without overstretching the Stott family budget. A few weeks ago (right after I wrote the initial holiday spending piece, in fact), my wife and I took Maeve for a day out to the winter fair at the school my wife used to teach at. As with all good winter fairs, there was food and shopping aplenty -- including a full room dedicated solely to second-hand toys, a previously untapped market for me. I'm not going to reveal the full extent of everything we bought there -- I'm convinced Maeve is like Stewie from Family Guy, and can read but is hiding it from us to her advantage -- but suffice it to say that for $15 we picked up enough mint-condition toys to give any one year-old a decent Christmas, and for $50 we would have needed a second car to get everything home!

(The sad side note is that there was so much other stuff in perfect or near-perfect condition that would have made any child happy, but while I can give second-hand toys to my own kid, I can't give them to the "Toys for tots" program my office is running this festive season. I understand that there are sound reasons for not accepting some second-hand toys, but a blanket ban seems a little harsh, if indicative of the times we live in.)

The second-hand thing is something I've really come to embrace since becoming a parent. While I flirted with thrift store shopping as a poor student -- poor in that I couldn't afford a decent winter coat but always seemed to have money for beer! -- finding stuff for kids seems much easier, and entails much less in the way of digging through racks of mold-infested tat. Part of the reason is that people tend to overbuy for children, whether their own or someone else's, and kids grow and develop so fast that the clothes and toys they get can end up very lightly used, if at all, by the time the child is too old for them.

So far, my wife and I have spent next to nothing on clothes or toys for Maeve, as we've been fortunate enough to have a few neighbors and colleagues with slightly older kids, so we've benefited greatly from others' clutter -- oftentimes getting full outfits that still have the store tags on them. The only problem I had was getting over an initial twinge of pride ("I'm capable of providing for my own child") -- something that evaporated as soon as I comprehended the sheer amount of stuff that people accumulate when kids come on the scene. At that point, pragmatism overtook pride as I realized it would be downright stupid not to take advantage of an entire stream of good-quality free stuff that we'd have ended up buying anyway.

As for the other main reason our holiday shopping exploded, I have two words for you: recession and bankruptcy. If you've got kids and you haven't been down to your local branch of KB Toys to snap up the bargains, there may still be time. I'd been expecting a full-on melee to be in progress when I arrived at ours, but was surprised to find that the crowds were light enough to make it some of the least stressful holiday shopping I've done so far. Come to think of it, it's probably a reflection of why the firm went bust in the first place -- I only realized we had a KB Toys in town when I saw a guy with a sign promoting the going out of business sale. Turns out it was right next door to our usual grocery store!

Anyway, the point of this wasn't to gloat about making out like a bandit in the recession (although that does feel nice!), but to point out that there's more than one way to skin the holiday shopping cat - especially with the economic mess out there this year, which has actually benefited people like me who tend to leave their gift buying until the last minute. I also wanted to point out that, although I may dole out advice on gift giving, I'm as likely as anyone to overshoot the boundaries of my well-crafted plans -- especially where my kid's involved. The trick is to try and do it when opportunity arises. As my own dad said when I called him lamenting the volume of stuff we'd bought: "You have an attic. You don't have to give it all at once." On which note...I'm off to see what I can find in the sales for next Christmas!