Except that when I went into my clearance buying frenzy, I didn’t think about the fact that this  Christmas, I’d be the mommy of a nine month-old and have no time to write Christmas cards. Or that I’d want to send personalized Christmas cards, with a picture of the not-so new baby (and possibly his parents).

So, despite having the dozens of Christmas cards in my stationery drawer, I’ll be purchasing cards from Shutterfly.

I first discovered Shutterfly last March, when the Burt Squirt was born and I received a coupon for birth announcements in a packet from the hospital. Since I had a newborn and really didn’t have time to go to a lot of trouble for birth announcements, I checked out the site. The design selection thoroughly impressed me, as did the simplicity of uploading a picture and personalizing the text. All told, I spent about ten minutes creating and ordering beautiful announcements (that I still see hanging on friends’ and family members’ refrigerators), and two or three days later they arrived in the mail, ready to be stuffed into envelopes and mailed. The price was good, too, especially because of the online coupon code I found for free shipping.

My experience as a Shutterfly customer was so good that I won’t consider ordering anywhere else. With 30% off cards and free shipping for orders of $50 and over (and an additional 5% off coupon code), I hardly feel guilty about not using all those cards I already bought. The hardest part is choosing between all of the adorable Christmas photo card and holiday card designs!  (I think I’m going with the Retro Ornaments Green to highlight the family picture I chose for this year’s card.)

And did I mention that for blogging about Shutterfly, I’m getting 50 FREE holiday cards–and you can, too?!

So check your mailboxes this December, because you may just find a Shutterfly card from me! (But if you don’t, it’s not because you’re Charlie Brown. It’s just because you didn’t send me a card last year. *wink*)

How do I know this?

Well…After I managed to snag nearly $60 worth of spices for $4 last Sunday, I might have gone back to Albertsons the following Friday and seen that the deal was still on and they had an Italian spice blend in this time and I still had a $3.00 off coupon and cleaned them out again without once swiping my credit card.

And, addicted to amused by hitting the jackpot not once, but twice, Mr. Burt and I might have driven to two other nearby Albertsons (because there was a cinnamon sugar blend we hadn’t managed to score yet), only to discover that there are other shoppers like us in town but no other Albertsons employees who like to watch customers treat the self-checkout like a slot machine; the other Carrollton store had sold clean out of the bargain spice grinders, and while the Lewisville location had plenty in stock, they’d rigged the self-checkouts to discourage the kind of extreme couponing required to pull off this deal.

And I might have made a third trip to my neighborhood Albertsons yesterday (not for free spices, I swear!) and discovered that they had followed suit.

It was a buzz kill sad day for frugality, but I take heart in the knowledge that I got $133.92 worth of spices for the low low price of $4.

Pepper, anyone?

You know when you go to the store for two or three specific items and you come out with considerably more than what’s on your list? That happened to Mr. Burt and me today. Only usually when that happens, you also come out with considerably less money than you expected. Which is not what happened to Mr. Burt and me when we went to Albertsons this evening for onion powder, turmeric, paprika, and ground coriander, and came out with an additional twenty-one jars of spices.

Yes, you read that correctly: twenty-one jars of spices.

It all started when the only ground coriander we could find cost a whopping $6.29. As we had whole coriander in our spice rack at home, which has never been used in the six and a half years since we were given said spice rack for our wedding, it seemed like the thing to do was to buy a pepper mill and grind our own coriander. (Probably it should have seemed like the thing to do was to throw out six and a half year-old coriander, but this is a couple of cheapskates with compulsive hoarding tendencies we’re talking about.)

Problem being, there were no pepperless mills for sale.

But this wasn’t much of a problem, after all, as Albertsons was running a special on McCormick peppercorn and sea salt grinders. For the low low price of $1 (regularly $2.79), we could empty the black peppercorn from the grinder and fill it with our rancid old coriander.

We grabbed two, though looking back, we couldn’t tell you why we grabbed two. It was just lucky that we did, as, at the end of our transaction, the coupon printer presented us with a coupon for $1.50 off the purchase of two McCormick spices.

“Does that mean,” Mr. Burt said, “that we could buy two more of those black peppercorn grinders for fifty cents?”

I reasoned that it wouldn’t hurt to see, since we regularly cook with fresh ground pepper, so Mr. Burt ran back to the spice aisle for two more. Sure enough, after our coupon, they rang up for fifty cents.

And we got another of those buy two, get $1.50 off coupons.

Only this time I read the fine print, which stated that there was also the option of buying three McCormick spices and getting a $3.00 off coupon.

Mr. Burt’s eyes locked with mine.

He raced back to the spice aisle and got six more. We paid $1.50 for the first three spice jars and got a coupon to apply to the next three. Which came up free, not even requiring us to swipe a credit card, and still printed off a $3.00 off coupon.

“What the heck?” Mr. Burt cried through his hysterical laughter. “Can we now get infinite free peppercorn grinders?”

I shot a furtive glance at the Albertsons employee manning the self-checkouts, afraid he’d report us to a manager who’d kick us out of the store for taking advantage of this extraordinarily good deal, but he was laughing along with us.

“That’s the beauty of the self-checkouts,” he said. “Sometimes you hit the jackpot. It’s like your own personal Las Vegas.”

Mr. Burt and I had better not ever go to Las Vegas. Compulsive personalities, I repeat. With the permission of the cashier, we cleaned out Albertsons’ entire stock of peppercorn and sea salt grinders. (Conveniently, it was a number divisible by three.)

All told, we came home with twenty-one jars and only paid $4. We could have gotten them for $3, if we’d cottoned to the system earlier. Still, that was only $4 for $58.59 worth of pepper, pepper blends, and sea salt.

And at the end, there was another $3 off three coupon.We asked the cashier what we should do with it. He didn’t suggest we leave it for the next customer; he encouraged us to go to another Albertsons and clean out their stock. We didn’t, because the story was already funny enough.

Or was it?

In any case, we have more salt and pepper than we can use by the 2014 expiration date. If you need some, come to our house. You can have three–and our coupon.

(And if you were wondering, our little plan to use a pepper mill for our coriander fell flat, as the jars are constructed with non-removable tops. We didn’t notice anything missing from our steaks.)

But even getting something small for free is hugely thrilling. For instance, the other day I bought seven boxes of cereal because A) they were on sale for a really good price and B) you got a free package of Pop Tarts and three free gallons of milk.  It’s a sensible combination for a deal, isn’t it?  Cereal, milk, Pop Tarts — all breakfast foods.  However, I’m at a loss to see the sense in this manufacturer’s coupon offer from the past Sunday’s paper:

Possibly I could see the connection if this were any other soda being offered for free with the purchase of eggs — a lot of people do drink soda with breakfast, and eggs aren’t just a breakfast food.  But Big Red?  Who over the age of eight drinks Big Red?  (Also, I must register my astonishment that there’s actually a Diet Big Red.  Are people who don’t find liquid bubblegum sickeningly sweet really that bothered about sugar?)  In any case, this is one coupon I did not clip with the intent of squirreling away a little extra money while our economy goes down the toilet.

Speaking of the economy, some brave soul has decided to start a new business in our area.  About a week ago, I went out my front door to find a nylon bag hanging on the knob, accompanied by a flier advertising a pick-up dry cleaning company.  As in, on Tuesday morning, you put your clothes in the bag, leave it on your porch, and they pick it up and return my clothes to my porch on Friday, starched and hung neatly on hangers.  If you never intend to use the service, you put the empty bag out on Friday for pickup.

Is it just me, or does this strike you as a highly naïve operation?  First of all, does someone really expect me to be trusting enough to leave my good dry clean only clothes on my porch?  If you’ve ever been to my neighborhood, you’d know that stuff left outside your home is fair game for scavengers.  It won’t last five minutes.  And this is suburbia!

I myself am proof of the kind of property rights mindset people have around here:  on the first Friday pickup day, I did not return my blue nylon bag.  Truthfully, I forgot to put it on the porch, but that was probably more a case of out of sight, out of mind.  As in, the bag was out of sight, in my laundry closet, because I thought it would make a great laundry bag for wet clothes when traveling.  If you put a bag on my doorstep and invite me to take it into my home, it’s not coming out again.  It’s mine, my own, it came to me!  We’re in a recession, I must hold on to anything useful that should fall into my possession.

On one last money-saving note, this week I’ve been stricken with a nasty sinus infection and cough.  While debating whether to drag my sorry tail up to the pharmacy for cough syrup, I googled Robitussin to see if it actually would help.  According to Wikipedia, “some cough medicines may be no more effective than placebos for acute coughs in adults, including coughs related to upper respiratory tract infections” and “Recent studies have found that theobromine, a compound found in cacao, is more effective as a cough suppressant than prescription codeine. This compound suppresses the “itch” signal from the nerve in the back of the throat that causes the cough reflex. It is possible to get an effective dose (1 g, though 0.5 g may be sufficient) from 50g of dark chocolate, which contains 2 to 10 times more cacao than milk chocolate. Cocoa powder contains roughly 0.1 g per tablespoon.  Theobromine was also free from side effects in the blind tests.”

So, I have not spent money on Robitussin, and have instead been drinking many mugs of Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation.  Which may not have saved me money…But even in an economy like this, a spoon full of sugar — or in this case, a mug full of dark chocolate — makes the medicine go down in a most delightful way.