Christmas Gift The 12 Months of Dates Year 2

Gifting 12 months of dates: a date night for every month of the year. Ideas for gifting a year of dates to your spouse.

One of my favorite things to do in the whole world is to give someone I know and love a gift. I love how excited people get, or the moment they look at you and say “You remembered I said this?” when you give something they mentioned months earlier, or when you surprise someone and they genuinely love it. I love that Jacob and I decided early in our marriage that we would give less material things and more experiences to each other. We have a lot of wonderful memories and photos to enjoy all our experiences. In only 1 year and 10 months of marriage, I feel like we’ve had a very rich and full life.

I also love that this year we tried extra hard to make our gifts look special and wrap each one carefully with brown paper and some homemade embellishments. It really was a special and sentimental Christmas.

With that said, I had a hard time thinking how I could come up with anything close to my present last year, the gift where I gave 12 Months of Dates to my husband in a file box. Each month we’ve had one amazing date together and made an amazing memory. We’ve both loved that we’ve had these in addition to our budget, so some seriously special things have happened. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just needed to happen again this year. I figured I already had the file box and the system, I would just need some creativity to come up with 12 new dates.

I started out by making a list of ideas for dates we haven’t done that I thought we’d like to go on. It wasn’t hard to get to about 8 really fast! I then thought of some season dates, like we know a Broadway musical comes to Phoenix every spring, certain festivals happen every year, and certain holiday dates are hard to fit in around Halloween and Christmas if they aren’t planned. I plugged those into my list and had a working list pretty fast. I also consulted Groupon and Living Social several times for ideas with an eye on the expiration date of many activities. I think 3 dates total came from here, and they are unique ones I never would have come up with on my own!
The result- he was surprised all over again and just kept saying “I can’t believe you did this again!!!”

 

We’re excited to attend the Barrett Jackson car show in January, we’re also excited to share with you each month what we did for one of our Friday night dates!

I’m also so happy that my husband not only appreciated my gift to him, but made sure he let me know how much he appreciates the dates and memories we have, and the fact I document all of this on this blog. I couldn’t have been happier with the book he gave me for Christmas: our blog printed and formatted as an official book that we can read together and share with our future kids.

We’re so excited for 2013 and all the wonderful memories it will bring!