With wish list(s) in hand (or at least in progress), it is time to face the facts and create your Christmas budget. The holidays are about loved ones and about GIVING, right? However, if you do not create a budget to guide your purchases over the next few months, the holidays will be about giving to your credit card company for the next year!

The Countdown to Christmas Challenge for today is to prepare a budget to place in your handy holiday planner for quick reference throughout the holiday season. List your expenses to have an accurate record of all that is involved with the joyous, but often rather expensive, holiday. Refer to it often to keep you on track. Next year, when it is time to create another Christmas budget, you can look back on this budget as a guide for future spending.

Some categories to include in your Christmas budget are: Gifts, Decorations, Food/Drink, Holiday Entertainment, and Charitable Giving. *

• List of Steps to Budgeting for the Holidays
• List of Ways to Curb Spending for the Holidays

* Available as a download in the 100 Days to Christmas 2011 eBook.  Members to ListPlanIt.com can print or download Holiday Budget Planner in Holidays & Occasions as a worksheet for your Christmas budget.

This week, we are excited to be giving away a Kindle 3G plus a gift card from Amazon for $5 toward the purchase of our 100 Days to Christmas 2011 eBook.

You have several ways to enter to win : 1) leave a comment here and tell us why you’d like a Kindle,

2) tell your friends & followers about 100 Days to Christmas on Twitter (it’s easy to do with our share buttons below) and leave a comment here linking to your Twitter handle (be sure to follow @100Days on Twitter, too),

3) subscribe to 100 Days to Christmas‘ RSS feed using a reader or by email (and get our daily posts delivered straight to your inbox) and leave a comment here,

4) blog about 100 Days to Christmas, then leave a comment here linking to your post.

5) follow our page on Facebook and tell our entire community that you are going to participate in this week’s giveaway by leaving the following message on our Facebook wall, “Christmas would come early this year if I win a Kindle 3G from http://100DaystoChristmas.com!”.

One of each of these per day please. You have until Friday, September 23 at 6 pm EST to enter.