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We only gift to kids - no adults

How has your husband handled this in the past? I'd be wary of buying for just some of the family because it might cause hurt feelings. What about doing a name-draw?

Well first I'd eliminate all adults from that side from your list and do children only. 15 nieces and nephews is still tough. It depends on the dynamic a lot- is everyone close to each other? Do you actually get together over the holidays? I'd probably either go ahead and only buy for the kids I have a relationship with, or commit to a gift for each kid but keep it SMALL.

We give presents to our parents/step parents/grandmother (7) and all of our nieces and nephews (9 total). I exchange gifts with my sister but DH does not exchange gifts with his two brothers. We do a Yankee swap with our extended families.

@Mamaof2: that's a good idea too, then you have 5 family gifts to worry about instead of 10 individuals.

We have only exchanges gifts with my in laws once since married at that was because we visited them on Christmas Day. I would start there. If you see them on the actual holiday- okay Christmas Eve too then bring a gift. If you can without making waves just gift the kids.

FWIW you don't have to be religious to participate in Christmas. The way one can celebrate- Christmas tree, cookies, lights etc can all be done without a single mention of Jesus.

What does the rest of his family do? I'd follow their lead.

On my side we gift everyone (3 siblings, 2 SO, parents, and our 2 kids). On DH's side we just gift the kids (9) and keep it less than $15 each.

Extended family mom's side does a white elephant exchange with everyone 18+.

In your situation I wouldn't gift the adults, and would just do the children. If you're getting together for Christmas then it definitely wouldn't be fair to gift some kids and not others. Just keep the $ to a minimum per kid.

My dad grew up in a big family as one of six (so twelve in total if you count spouses) and I had eleven cousins on that side. The way his family handled Christmas was doing a drawing at Thanksgiving. Every grandchild's name was put in a few times (two or three?), and my grandparents plus aunts and uncles would draw names to determine who they would be getting presents for that year.

So, my husband's family does things a little strangely, but it seems to work out well. There are 4 adult siblings and partners, the parents (inlaws) and a grandmother. We draw names for this. I would love to get rid of this completely, but it's my MIL's thing.

As for the kids, there are currently 4 of them (one is my own). The adult siblings only buy for the children that they are godparent to. So my husband buys for his one godson, but not his sister's two other children. My sister in law buys for my son, as does my husband's baby sister (they're super close) but his brother does not. It seemed weird at first, but we just followed their lead and did what they did and it's gone off beautifully.

We only give gifts to D's family (I'm estranged from mine). The kids get gifts from everyone (6 grandchildren, total) and the adults do a Yankee Swap gift exchange.

My family needs to have this chat! We always give to everyone but now as we are older/married/kids/BIL/SIL
It's getting to be a lot!!!!!

@LCTBQE: It's so hard. I would love to cut back but I don't see how we could do it, since we've been giving gifts to all the kids for so long. We do limit how much we spend per child and that helps some. We see all of these individuals for Christmas which also makes it hard to decide to scale back on gifts.

@LCTBQE: It isn't a lot of effort. I would rather buy for 9 more kids, they are fun, verses adults. I mean my grandma needs nothing, so hard coming up with something that isn't cheesy.

We usually buy for parents/grandparents on each side and have bought for our siblings (though I'm hoping to get rid of this soon!). On my dad's side, there is a HUGE family. He is one of 12 siblings and I have 30 first cousins on that side. So we always do three different exchanged (kids, adult women, and adult men). Each year we do it a little differently, some years we pick names, others we do a white elephant, others we do a gag gift. It just depends on who plans it. Kids also receive gifts from godparents (we are all catholic and all have godparents on that side). On my mom's side we only have one first cousin, so we usually bought for him too. He's astranged now, so no one buys for him really.

We do a gift exchange and I love it. Everyone gets to buy a gift for 1 person and everyone gets to receive 1 gift. Keeps the fun and traditional part of gift giving without a huge expense of time and money to buy for everyone. And limits the amount of unwanted gifts!

Personally, I don't like the idea of cherry picking specific nieces/nephews because it can cause friction in the family. What I would do, instead, is do no presents at Christmas and then do presents for the nieces/nephews that you're close with on their birthday or just give random gifts at other times of the year. That way it's less obvious that you're singling them out.

We gift only to kids and DHs parents because they watch our kids 3x/week. I'm definitely closer to some Neices and nephews more than others, but I don't feel right not gifting for all of them. It's hard though because I barely know some of them and what they are into. But, they're still our nieces and nephews.

We do gifts for the kids (2 nephews) and then my siblings and their SO's all get together and we each spend $25.00 on a nice gift (last year I did a salt slab for the grill) and then we do a nice white elephant exchange. It was waaaaay cheaper than in the past and everyone got a gift and was happy. Easy peasy. If we had more nephews or nieces, I would probably just get them each a small gift rather than multiple gifts.

These are such tricky situations because you never want to leave anyone out or have anyone's feeling get hurt. Probably worth it to have a conversation to decide what direction family member want to go in.

We do a Yankee swap on my side and no gifts on DH's side. There are 18 nieces and nephews and 15(soon 16) great nieces and nephews.
We can't afford to do that many gifts and everyone is fairly well off and don't really need for anything.

For the kids, we all draw the amount of names that you have kids. So since I have 2 boys, I draw 2 names. And then we have a dollar limit to keep it fair.

For the adults, we all buy for my parents and they buy for all of us but we now do a white elephant exchange that's all of the adults and have so much fun.