My parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, were thrifty but festive during the holidays. My mother spread the newspaper on the clean floor of our garage and lightly sprayed a can of gold paint over the pages. This became our Christmas wrapping paper. She tied her packages with a red ribbon and added two wired pine cones and a fresh sprig of fragrant pine. Cheap, simple, but also elegant.

I’ve learned the hard way how to be more frugal. For example, when my husband and I went to live in Hawaii for three years, I thought it would be cool to send some aloha spirit home in the form of six-packs of macadamia nuts. This misadventure had me paying more in mailing costs than what the nuts themselves cost.

To add insult to injury, when we flew home for the holidays the next year, I saw in our local drug store the same six-pack of macadamia nuts at approximately the same price charged in Hawaii.

Nothing against the U.S. Post Office, but I now try to keep my holiday mailing costs down by bringing Christmas presents to whomever is hosting Thanksgiving that year and to other family members in attendance. My sister’s son still likes putting together Legos, so we pool our orders together to receive the free shipping on orders of $99 or more and special rewards offers.

Frugal shoppers note that until midnight on December 20, L.L. Bean offers free shipping on all of its merchandise, although customers ordering furniture will incur a freight charge, stated Nancy in customer service.

After both of my parents died when my son was still an infant, I carried on the newspaper wrapping tradition in a much simpler style. Now when our employed (yay!) 22-year-old, college grad son comes home from Boston for Christmas, he knows where to look for his gifts from Santa. They’re wrapped in the sports pages that contain interesting Celtics and Patriots news with a big “Ho, Ho, Ho!” written with a red Sharpie. Our 16-year-old daughter, who’s big into art, just looks for her gifts to be wrapped in the Sunday comics with the same red “Ho, Ho, Ho!”

One year, we were in a true “CAN do” mood when it came time to make Christmas and hostess gifts. We collected and cleaned soda cans, took off the tab, bent the can in the middle and made many trios of red, white, and green choir angels to give as gifts. It was an inexpensive gift to make: we just bought glue; red, white and green raffia; red, white, green, black, and tan paint; thin pieces of bendable gold for halos; fake straw material for hair; and photocopied the hymns for the angels to hold.

The next year, we made mama and baby angels from gourds. Both sets of angels are about a decade old and seem to have held up well. Another year, it was a heavy lift when my daughter made door stopper holiday houses out of bricks.

Now, we have to decide what type of Christmas ornaments we’re going to make with the sea life that we seem to attract. First, it was the 60-odd sand dollars that we found floating like spaceships on the waves at Scarborough’s Pine Point Beach during an early summer morning walk.

Several years later, during a trip to Block Island for our anniversary, we found 170 starfish washed up on the beach during another walk at dawn. A worker at a snack shack gave us containers to hold the smelly creatures. When we got home, we sprayed them with lemon and laid them out in the sun to dry. I predict that friends and relatives will see Santa starfish and sand dollars this holiday.

As I go about my holiday shopping, I try to follow what American essayist Charles Dudley Warner said about gifts: “The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.”

I know several homesick Mainers who live out of state and won’t be coming home for the holidays. Two enjoy wine and two are recent college grads who prefer beer. In my efforts to keep mailing costs down, I’ll send the wine drinkers a red lobster claw wine stopper ($5.95 apiece at Wyler Gallery in Brunswick) and put a crisp $10 bill in a small $1 Santa tin from Craft-Mania in Auburn, along with a list of “Best Wines $10 & Under.” The working college grads will receive a sturdy metal red lobster beer opener ($8.50 from Nest in Brunswick), along with another crisp $10 bill and note encouraging them to try out some new beers.

As for gift giving and party hostessing, Lewiston-Auburn residents are certainly lucky to live in an area that offers a wide variety of good discount stores within close proximity to one another. They’ll definitely feel more jolly by enjoying the two-fold savings: using less gas to comparison shop and buying the best-priced item.

It appears that Mainers will continue to be careful with their holiday spending, based on an October survey by Critical Insights. This survey of 600 Maine residents showed that 48 percent of respondents expected to spend less on holiday gifts this year; 49 percent planned to spend the same amount; and only 3 percent expected to spend more.

To lure consumers into stores to shop early, major retailers like Sears and Toys-R-Us started offering Black Friday deals on the Friday before Halloween and will continue every week through December.

Lee Duguay, president of Craft-Mania on Center Street in Auburn, noted that “while adults will cut back on holiday spending for other adults, they’ll still buy for their kids.” Duguay said that he enjoyed “great sales with the hands-on, educational toys and art supplies” that he ordered last year and has placed an even bigger order this year.