During the holiday season, department stores, catalog retailers and The Swiss Colony aren't the only businesses anxiously queuing up for a slice of the fourth-quarter pie, i.e. your holiday wallet. Been grocery shopping lately?

What a difference a few days makes! By November 2, Halloween's candy displays have given way to a maze of buy-me buy-me holiday foodstuffs.

No more straight shots down the aisle. Even in the dog food aisle, shoppers must dodge flimsy cardboard displays of holiday this-n-that. Formerly well-mannered spices abandon their tidy shelves and tower in unsteady stacks at odd corners. Holiday paper goods, holiday turkey pans, holiday stuffing mix, even holiday toilet tissue force shopping carts into desperate evasive maneuvers down every aisle.

It's those grocery guys. They want your money. If you shop wisely, you can fund your family's holiday meals for less than you think--and for lots less than the grocery guys want you to spend!

How? By understanding how to play the Grocery Game. You must get inside the heads of those very same grocery guys.

Food and the holidays go hand-in-hand. Holiday cooking magazines are among the first signs of an approaching holiday season. Sumptuous desserts, winsome cookies, glowing turkeys warm our images of Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year.

But oh! My aching feet! Even those of us who lead a Little Debbie life from January to November succumb to holiday baking madness. Cookies. Breads. Pies. Candy. It wouldn't be the holidays without them--but isn't there any way around the baking chores?

I has one suggestion that can simplify the holiday bake-fest: a specialty. One baked good--cake or cookie or tea bread or candy--that you make each year, in bulk, and give to everyone with a flourish that proclaims it a specialty.

"Frugal" holiday meals? Something of a conundrum, isn't it? The very nature of holiday meals is to express the value of abundance.

Finances, on the other hand, have definite limits--and never so much as during the Christmas holidays. Consider these tips to serve up a holiday meal without breaking the bank:

Know your portions

There's nothing like a giant, gleaming turkey at the head of that Thanksgiving table to warm holiday hearts. The economic downside to that big bird? Waste! Most of us know the shame of tossing several pounds of dried-out drumsticks and crumbled white meat a week after the feast is over.