Our family always gives gifts to my best friend and her family. We don't live in the same city any longer so generally we mail them to each other. She is married and has three children close in age to my girls.

Buying gifts for five people could be a financial drain, but I usually buy their gifts with coupons or on clearance. This is what I'm getting each of them this year:

Friend: Hallmark ornament worth $9.95, used a $5 off coupon. Out of pocket: $4.95 plus tax.

Friends Husband: A wallet on sale for $9.99, used a $10 off a $10 purchase coupon at JC Penney's. Making this item FREE. (Yes, I did purchase one other item for my daughters stocking to get to the $10 limit)

Teenage Son: A $10 gift card to a gas station. It was free with my renewed newspaper subscription. I'm still waiting for this to arrive in the mail. Fingers crossed it does.

Teenage Daughter: $10 Aeropostle gift card. My daughter has had this for a year and isn't going to use. I'm exchanging my last $10 Target gift card with her. Thus another free gift!

11 Year Old Son: I bought him a small lego set at Target for $9.99 and used a $5 Target gift card. My out of pocket cost was $5.32 on my Target Red Card.

Did you notice most items were free? I only spent $10.57 to purchase gifts for five people!! I'm not sure if these will be mailed or not, but it should only cost another $5 if I needed.

Thanks to My English Castle for pointing out the great deal at Target that can be found on their facebook page. Spend $50 and get a $10 gift card.

Once you find the link on the Target facebook page, it takes you to a page where you can print the coupon for the gift card.

Umm...I did this twice today already! The coupon expires tomorrow, December 3rd. I also used coupons for the items I was buying and used my Target Red Card. These were given after I qualified for the $50 spending. One of my totals came to $43.92 after coupons.

I only bought items we normally buy, including cheese, walnuts, toilet paper, pop, crackers, milk and a few other items I needed for holiday baking.

I know for sure that I'm using the two $10 gift cards to purchase alcohol for my brother in law. It's like getting his gift for free!!

I redeemed some MyPoints recently for a Bath and Body Works gift card in the amount of $10. Lucky for me two people on my list wanted items from there!!

I happened upon a printable coupon that you can find at the

retailmenot.com website that offered one item free after a $10 purchase. The free item can be worth up to $13!!

I did two different purchases. The first purchase included Japanese Cherry Blossom body cream ($12.50) and two soaps ($5 each). In this case the body cream was free with the printable coupon. I used the $10 gift card to cover most of the $10.60 total. I only spent $0.60 out of pocket!

The second purchase included another Japanese Cherry Blossom body cream ($12.50). Can you tell someone likes this? I also bought a Shimmer Body Lotion ($14). With another copy of the printable coupon I received the body cream free. My out of pocket cost was $14.84.

In the end I ended up with five items from Bath and Body Works and spent $15.44. That averages out to $3.09 per item!! On an even more interesting note: the $14 item is a gift for my daughter but will be from my mother in law who gave me cash to do the shopping. So the other items actually were free and not paid from our cash! Yipee!!

That coupon is about the fourth item down on the list when you click on the link above. The coupon is good until December 24th. Don't forget to read the fine print. I don't believe it is good with any other offers.

I've got a few other good deals from the last several days. Stay tuned and I'll tell you about them! In the meantime, do you have any good deals those of us holiday shopping should know?