Stocking stuffers for less

I made all of my children's stockings myself.  For some reason, I made them really large.  Oops.  That was before I realized how expensive it can be to fill them.  Over the last couple of years, we've come up with a few solutions that are inexpensive, but make our children really happy.  Because we don't have a lot of money to spend on food, we choose to not spend money on junk food.  This makes filling Christmas stockings really fun and exciting for our kids, but really practical for us.  We will get them each their very own 20 oz. soda (that they don't have to share!) and a snack size bag of chips.  There are often coupons for candy bars if you look around and you can get them for either pretty cheap or free.  Target often has buy one get on free coupons on gum (which my five year old loves).  At the end of the Halloween season, my grocery store had their bags of snack sized candy on sale for just a dollar.  They also had their great big bags of skittles for just a dollar.  My kids love skittles.  So they're each getting their own bags (the snack sized stuff went into the advent calendar).   I end up spending less than $10 for 3 stockings.  If you look at drug stores throughout the year, you can usually get chap stick, nail polish and all sorts of small things for either free or really cheap.  My CVS often has a 90% off basket with all sorts of good stuff in it.  Because my kids are little, I usually use that stuff for me, but if I had older kids, I would save it for them.