Three Babes Bakeshop

Give the gift of pie! Three Babes Bakeshop is among the many American purveyors selling delicious gifts this holiday season.

Give yummy gifts to the food lovers in your life, with just a couple clicks. All of these delicious products are American-made and available by mail order. You might even want to send yourself some!

Savory
Sommer Hof farms' cheese biscuits
This long-time caterer in upstate New York had to give up her party business just to keep with the demand for her delicious cheddar cheese biscuits. Made with top quality ingredients like Cabot cheddar cheese, sweet cream butter, wheat flour and spices--you can't eat just one! Sommer Hof cheddar cheese biscuit tin, $20.

Olympic provisions
The owner of this Portland, Ore.-based butcher/charcuterie/restaurant grew up with a Greek father who cured his own meat at home. Now he has made a business out of his father's hobby. He starts his salami with a local supply of all-natural, antibiotic-free pork that he and his staff butcher and combine with hand-ground spices. The result is an incredibly smooth and creamy product, with a pungent pork flavor. Sausage sampler of four (including cacciatore, salami nola, sopressata and finocchiona), $40.

Suzy Sirloin's sliders
The Suzy behind Suzy Sirloin is member of the Strassburger family, which has been delivering top quality prime and aged beef to the best steakhouses in the country for five generations. Suzy, realizing that consumers were growing more health-conscious thereby wanting leaner, all-natural meats, started this company to provide superior American farm-raised beef, pork, lamb and veal that have no hormones or antibiotics and are 90 percent lean. A family favorite: the Kids Cuts sliders. Kids Cuts, $99 for 2 packs each of beef, veal, lamb and turkey sliders.

Belle Chevre
This award-winning cremerie in rural Alabama is run by a woman who, years ago, fell in love with chevre. Her small company uses European farmstead techniques so the cheese takes on a mild and unique flavor. Each cheese is hand made, but new to her offerings are cheese-making kits that come with all you need to make your own goat cheese at home. Play date gift box, $50, includes 4 varieties of chevre; DIY cheese kit, $29.95.

Back to the Roots mushroom kit
This company was founded by two UC Berkeley students who got the idea during a class lecture about growing mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds. After experimenting in their fraternity kitchen, they piqued the interested of Whole Foods. Three years later they reuse 3.6 million pounds of coffee grounds from Peet's coffee and they help families grow over 135,000 pounds of fresh food at home. Mushroom kit, $19.95, grows up to 1.5 pounds of oyster mushrooms in as little as 10 days.

Snacks
Krave jerky
Using top quality all-natural ingredients, the jerky comes in a variety of flavors such as basil citrus and lemon garlic turkey, smoky grilled teriyaki beef and pineapple orange beef. It's even 97 percent fat free! Sampler pack, $35 for five bags.

Nothin' But snack bars
Started by a single mother in Westport, Connecticut, Nothin' But premium snack bars are made with organic oats, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, organic cane sugar, olive oil and honey. All bars are created in small batches and shipped within 72 hours of baking. Flavors include chocolate coconut almond, cherry cranberry almond, ginger lemon cashew, and peanut butter banana chocolate. $48 for a dozen.

Sweets
Three Babes Bakeshop pies
Friends since third grade, the two (yes, it's really just two) babes behind this California pie business have been baking together for 15 years. They source most of their ingredients from local farmers and all ingredients are organic. Try their bourbon pecan or honey walnut pies with classic crusts or try their bittersweet chocolate pecan pie with a homemade gluten-free graham cracker crust. Bittersweet chocolate pecan, bourbon pecan, salty honey walnut pies, $35.

Brown Butter Cookie Company
Two sisters started this company four years ago in the small California beach town of Cayucos. Now they have 30 employees who help them brown the butter and hand roll each brown butter sea salt cookie. The cookies are sweet and salty--the sisters' secret version of shortbread. They come in several varieties: original, spice, cocoa, espresso, coconut lime and gluten-free cocoa mint. Brown butter sea salt cookies, $12.95 a dozen.

Perl Girl Baking rugelah
Started by two sisters who grew up in a baking family and have focused their business on the classic Jewish pastries, rugelah, adding their own twist to them. Try their peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and chocolate, or fig and almond varieties, $20 per pound (about 2 dozen).

Notti Toffee
Hand-made in the economically hard hit Alleghany County of North Carolina, this toffee company was started with the intent of creating jobs. The special family recipe was given to the company's owner by her mother-in-law and for 15 years she made the toffee for her friends and family at Christmastime, to which the response was always "This is so good, you should sell it."  When the economy turned in 2009, she decided to go for it and now employs several fellow Appalachian women. Notti toffee pail, from $20.

More from TODAY:

• 5 beers that taste like Christmas
• Perfect pork: Paula Deen makes holiday ham 4 ways
• Hanukkah with a tropical twist: Guava doughnuts and more

Getty

The first step to buying holiday gifts: create a budget.

We don’t have to tell you: You already know the holidays are expensive.

But what’s the best way to tackle them with your emergency fund intact and your credit card debt not out of control? (Because no one likes having a financial hangover in January.)

The first step is to create your holiday budget today. 

But we’re not saints.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and holiday fun following closely behind, if you haven’t started saving already, time is running out.

So, let’s just say you don’t have 100 percent of the cash on hand that you’ll need for your holiday expenses. Theoretically. What can you do?

Learnvest.com: $25,000 in debt: How I paid off my credit cards in 2 years

We’ve compiled a list of ways you could fund your holiday fun, from the best to the please-promise-us-you’ll-never-do-this worst.

1. Putting it on a credit card (wisely)
Credit cards only get you into trouble when you don’t pay them back on time, in full. If you can put something on your credit card with absolute certainty that you can pay the whole sum back by the end of the month, that’s the best way, other than cash, to pay for your holiday gifts. Unless, of course, you get major points for using your card. If that's the case in your case, charge away. But set up a calendar alert so you don’t forget to pay off that hefty bill in the midst of holiday madness.

2. Working off of the zero percent introductory APR
As an incentive to woo customers, some credit cards offer a zero percent APR introductory period. In general, taking advantage of that period can be risky — after all, when the period ends, your interest will shoot right back up. But as long as you know exactly how long you have before your card starts accruing interest, you can use the lead time to pay it off entirely.

3. Getting scrappy
If you’ve got a long gift list and you're not making do-it-yourself gifts and you don’t have enough cash on hand to pay off your credit card, see how much money you can loosen up simply by making more of it — that is to say, more money.

Learnvest.com: The 4 biggest financial fears, and how to conquer them

Some stores will be looking for seasonal help now, and you could also sign up for TaskRabbit, and make money helping other people run their holiday errands. Do you have a lot of fancy dresses lying around? Sell them on eBay.

4. Opting for layaway
Layaway is kind of like paying for something on credit because you are buying it in installments, but it isn’t actually a loan, and won’t hurt your credit score. Rather, the store will hold the item you want instead of selling it. You put down money for two things: the down payment on your purchase and the layaway fee. (Very rarely, stores will offer free layaway as a promotional deal.) Then you’ll pay off your item in installments, and when you’re done, it’s yours.

Pros: You can pay in installments without taking out credit. You can reserve an item at a special sale price. The process discourages impulse buying.

Learnvest.com: 13 Things not to buy for your kid

Cons: Layaway fees are often around 5 percent to 10 percent of the total cost, which is steep considering that this isn’t credit. If you abandon your purchase midway, you can get refunded some of your money, but the store will keep the layaway fees and may charge you extra for things like a “restocking” fee. If the cost of your item goes down, you’re still stuck with the price you locked in.

5. Borrowing from friends or family
Borrowing from loved ones can be extremely tricky. While it won’t hurt your credit report, it can strain your relationships at a time of year when you’ll likely be spending lots of quality family time. Before going this route, think long and hard. If you do decide to ask friends or family for financial help — for example, to help you pay for your plane ticket to visit — then iron out all the details before accepting any money: Are there strings attached? When do you need to pay them back? Will they charge you interest?

6. Putting it on a credit card ... and letting it stay there
Credit cards can be very powerful and useful, but only if you pay them off on time. Paying nothing but the minimums on your credit card means the money you owe will suffer from compounding interest, snowballing into more and more debt. If you can’t pay off the balance quickly, don’t put it on your credit card in the first place. Plus, if you miss any payments, your credit score will take a hit, too.

7. Taking out a credit card cash advance
Most credit card companies will let you take out cash through an ATM or a bank withdrawal, essentially taking out cash where normally they only give you credit. But that’s extremely dangerous. Your initial fee for a credit card cash advance could be as high as 3 percent to 5 percent, and the amount you take out starts accruing interest right away (rather than giving you a month to pay it off as is the case with normal credit card purchases). What's even worse is the fact that the immediately-accruing interest is often at a much higher rate than your normal credit card purchases. In other words, this method is bad news.

8. Bank advance direct deposit loan
This may sound benign — an advance on your salary, which is direct-deposited to your bank account. It sounds legitimate, too, because it’s offered by your bank in exchange for your repayment once you get your paycheck. That’s all well and good, but you live off your paycheck (presumably). So when you finally get that paycheck, if it has to flow straight to the bank to pay off the amount you took out for the holidays, you may have trouble paying rent and other basic expenses. This is an extremely dangerous cycle to get into, because then it’s all too easy to apply for another bank advance to pay those living expenses, and so on. As Fox Business puts it: “An advance on your direct-deposited salary is basically a bank-sanctioned payday loan.”

Learnvest.com: Obama wins: What it could mean for your wallet

And as we’re about to see, payday loans virtually always mean trouble.

9. Going for a payday loan
These are also often known as “predatory” loans, and they’re so bad they’re illegal in New York state. The State of New York Banking Department defines a payday loan as “a relatively small (usually under $500), high-interest, short-term loan” in which a borrower gets cash, minus lender’s fees.

The problem is that the loan periods are often extremely short, so there isn’t enough time to pay back the money, encouraging borrowers to keep rolling over the borrowing period. Fees are charged for each transaction, and the interest is sky-high, sometimes 400 percent or more!

In this same bucket of last-resort options there are such other bad options as tax refund anticipation loans and advance fee loan scams.

This story originally appeared on LearnVest.

More from LearnVest:

• This Magic Word Gets Women to Negotiate Their Salary
• Retirement Savings by Age: How Do Yours Compare?
• How Normal Are Your Finances?
• How Much the Fiscal Cliff Could Raise Your Taxes
• Woman Wins Lottery Twice in Three Months

Gus Ruelas / Reuters

Shoppers pay for their purchases at an Old Navy store last holiday season. This year, overall spending is expected to be cautious, except when it comes to spending on ouselves.

Holiday shoppers plan to deck the halls and splurge a bit more on themselves this year, but overall spending will remain cautious this holiday season as shoppers hunt out the bargains they know they’ll find this time of year, according to the results of a new survey.

The average holiday shopper will spend $749.51 on gifts, décor, greeting cards and more, up slightly from the $740.57 they actually spent last year, according to the survey conducted by BIGinsight for the National Retail Federation.

“We’ve seen this pattern of cautious optimism all year and despite the challenges that still exist in our economy, it looks as if consumers are eager to celebrate with friends and family,” said Matthew Shay, president and CEO of the National Retail Federation.

Recently, the NRF forecasted that holiday spending would rise 4.1 percent, slower than last year's growth, but higher than the average gains over the past 10 years.

‘One for You, Two for Me’
This year, holiday shoppers are looking to treat themselves, according to the survey. Six in ten shoppers, the most in the survey’s history, plan to spend an average of $139.92 on “self-gifting” this holiday season. The trend is even more pronounced among young adults between 18 years old and 24 years old, about 71.5 percent of those in this age group are planning to buy gifts for themselves.

Trendiest Halloween costumes for kids

“It looks like young adults have the ‘one for you, two for me’ mentality about the holiday season this year, which is surprising, given that this is also the age group that typically doesn’t have the income or ability to splurge,” said Pam Goodfellow, director of BIGinsights Consumer Insights division.

But it does make sense when you consider that retailers have conditioned shoppers to expect great deals on products during the holiday season. Consumers have been working hard over the past four years to hone skills to help them stretch their dollars and are likely taking advantage of the promotions, which have already started far ahead of Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving that has traditionally been considered to be the start of the holiday shopping season.

Waiting to begin holiday shopping until after Thanksgiving is a tradition that clearly has been broken. About 41.4 percent of 8,899 consumers polled in early October told NRF that they will begin their holiday shopping before Halloween.

Despite the scorn, consumers embrace 'Christmas creep'

Although the NRF didn’t cite specific reasons why shoppers are starting their shopping early, retailers have been offering many incentives to get shoppers in the buying mood. Not only have stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys 'R Us offered layaway programs, but there also were lots of promotions being offered as early as Labor Day weekend.

Stretching out the holiday shopping period also is a good strategy for more budget conscious shoppers who want cut any corners they can, comparison shop and spread out their purchases to soften the blow of holiday spending, and avoid the hangover of Christmas debt.

Retailers are pulling out the stops to get shoppers into the store early. Target began running its holiday ads this week, and it joined others such as Best Buy and Toys ‘R Us in offering price matching guarantees.

Trouble in Toyland: sales slowing heading into holidays

Economy less of a factor
Although these kinds of tactics may not move the needle significantly, it may make some more cautious customers feel more confident about making those purchases early.

This year, fewer shoppers in the NRF survey cited the economy as a factor in their spending plans, but the number remains high. Some 52.3 percent said the state of the U.S. economy would affect their spending, down from 62.2 percent last year.

That may reflect that consumers are simply accustomed to living on a budget and watching their spending, and may be better prepared for holiday spending.

According to the survey, the biggest portion of the holiday budget will go towards gifts for family members, with the average person planning to spend $421.82 on their kids, parents, and other family members. About $75.13 will be allocated to friends, $23.48 on co-workers, and $28.13 on others, including their pets and members of their community.

And don’t forget the decorations. Consumers are looking to be festive this year, and are pulling out the stops on décor. The average person will spend $51.99, up from $49.15 last year, and the most in the survey’s history. That means total spending on décor could reach $6.9 billion.

More shopping than ever will occur online, as has been the trend in recent years. More than half of all shoppers will do a portion of their shopping online, up from 46.7 percent last year.

And the most-wanted gift of all? Gift cards. Some 59.8 percent of those surveyed want to receive a gift card, more than other popular gifts such as clothing, books, DVDs, videogames and electronics. Nearly one quarter want jewelry, the highest response for this category since 2008.

More business news:

• Stock market is good gauge of election
• Higher-income workers have more work-at-home flexibility
• Uncle Sam gives retired workers a 1.7% raise
• Video: Pizza Hut backtracks on debate-related ad
• Sign up for our Business newsletter

Follow NBCNews.com business on Twitter and Facebook

“Christmas Creep” is the term for how retailers seem to keep bumping up the day they start promoting Christmas each year. It's not just for stores that barely have the decorative pumpkins out before they bring in the Santas, now the Christmas Creep is in your inbox.

Fifteen percent of top online retailers have already started the holidays in their email campaigns as of September 6, according to the 2012 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday season study released by Responsys. That's up from 11 percent at this same time in the past two years. And once they start perking up, they only increase exponentially. By Halloween, expect your inbox to be quite spooked by the Christmas Creep. It will be fully haunted by Thanksgiving.

Online retailers that began emailing in October last year have already launched their campaigns, said Christopher Donald, a strategist for the Inbox Group email marketing agency.

Retailers are constantly trying to edge each other out to be the one who gets to the shopper's pocketbook first. The earlier you can grab shoppers, the more they'll spend with you if you can grab them before the pursestrings get tight as the holidays get closer, said Donald. This leads to a veritable arms race with retailers emailing earlier and earlier each year.

If you're sick of it all and want to trim back the Christmas Creep's visits from your inbox, make sure to be selective when giving out your main email address to companies. And if you must give it out, consider using a disposable one, like one offered by mailinator.com. Gmail users can also use this handy trick.

Email marketers believe, however, that people are happy to see the Christmas Creep. “You might see a small amount of people annoyed,” said Donald, but “most people think, hey, I can get these great discounts even earlier.”

Believe what you want, spam man –- we'll be clicking “unsubscribe.”

More money and business news:

• Why we get a kick out of deceiving retailers
• Auto industry in middle of US-China trade conflict
• Fido's final rest: Pet funeral business beginning to boom
• Video: 6 suprising, easy ways to make extra cash
• Sign up for our Business newsletter

Follow NBCNews.com business on Twitter and Facebook

Sonny Hedgecock / AP

Kmart's holiday decorations were on sale by early October.

Christmas decorations hit some store shelves while many people were still wearing shorts, and hot holiday toy lists came out just as many families were crossing off the final items from their back-to-school shopping lists.

Now there’s news that Black Friday, that national frenzy of holiday shopping, is going to be starting as early as Thanksgiving evening, with big store chains like Wal-Mart and Toys 'R' Us opening their doors even as many families are still finishing their pie and coffee.

The widening of the holiday shopping season, sometimes referred to as “Christmas creep,” may leave some people grumbling, but don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

“Until there are really people outside stores picketing I don’t think the trend will abate, and I don’t think there’s a whole lot of downside for the retailers,” said Ted Marzilli, global managing director of BrandIndex, which tracks the public perception of brands.

Retailers are so desperate for your holiday shopping dollars after years of economic woes that they’ll try just about anything to get a bigger chunk of your limited budget, Marzilli and other analysts say. Offering deals earlier and earlier just may give some of those retailers a leg up on the competition.

“Is it really working? Too soon to tell. Can it work? The answer is clearly yes,” said Marshal Cohen, retail analyst with NPD Group.

Many shoppers already are on the lookout for deals.

A survey done in late October by YouGov BrandIndex found that nearly one-third of shoppers had already started shopping for holiday gifts. Nearly half expected to start before Thanksgiving, according to the survey, to be released this week.

That’s similar to results BrandIndex got in 2008, the last time the firm asked the question, Marzilli said.

Retailers aren’t necessarily going to squeeze much more money out of consumers by trying to get them to buy holiday gifts along with Halloween candy. Amid a weak economy and a high unemployment rate, the National Retail Federation is expecting holiday sales to increase a modest 2.8 percent this year over year-ago levels.

Retailers are hoping an early jump on promotions will allow them to steal some business from competitors who aren’t yet offering similar deals or at least snag some of their holiday shopping dollars earlier in the season, experts say.

“If the retailer can get some people thinking about Christmas sooner than they otherwise would … then (they’ve) locked up the $10 or $20 or $50 or $100 that the consumer was going to spend,” Marzilli said.

That’s one reason Black Friday has gradually expanded, with holiday-themed deals starting days or even weeks before the day after Thanksgiving.

Call all diehard Black Friday shoppers!

C. Britt Beemer, head of the consumer research firm America’s Research Group, said early Black Friday-type promotions also may be aimed at people who want a good deal but don’t want to endure the ever-earlier wake-up call for Black Friday (so named because retailers can get into the black with strong sales).

Shoppers who go to Walmart for one of its pre-holiday Super Saturday deals may pay slightly more for a flat-screen TV, Beemer said, “but they didn’t have to get up at 3 a.m.”

Still, Beemer is predicting that this year’s Black Friday will be bigger than ever.

To some Americans, getting up at dawn on Friday to go shopping is bad enough, but going shopping on Thanksgiving night is inexcusable. The activist group change.org has even started a petition to try to force retailer Target to change its plans to open at midnight on Thanksgiving rather than a few hours later early Friday.

A Target spokeswoman told msnbc.com the company still plans to open at midnight.

Cohen said the advent of social media could get the backlash effort some attention, but he doesn’t expect complaints about Christmas creep to have much effect on retailers’ plans.

“Right now we’re more concerned about getting the (European) debt crisis resolved and getting a jobs bill,” he said. “There’s so much more for people to be worried about than opening a store.”

Yes, it's only September, but Toys 'R' Us is already hoping to get shoppers interested in shopping for the holidays. The retailer this week unveiled its annual list of toys it hopes will hit big this holiday season.