A cosy, self-hosted Christmas budget & gift tracker for your household.
Jingle Jotter replaces the annual Christmas spreadsheet: one warm little web app that tracks every gift idea from "maybe?" to wrapped-under-the-tree, keeps four budgets honest (gifts, food, festive extras, and the December city break), and rolls forward year after year so past Christmases become a browsable archive.
- Purchase pipeline — every item moves Idea → Purchased → Arrived → Wrapped, with one-tap advancing (and a little confetti burst when something gets wrapped). Ideas count toward a "planned" figure, never the actual spend.
- Budgets that tell the truth — four categories out of the box (add your own), each with progress bars, over-budget warnings, and planned-vs-actual totals.
- Per-person gift tracking — allocations per recipient, spend vs budget, status counts, and gift-tag-shaped cards that earn a bow when everything's wrapped.
- Surprise-proof — link a login to a person and gifts for them are masked from their account (title hidden, no edit access, their own summary card omitted) while still counting toward shared budgets. Plan your partner's gifts in the same app they use.
- City break planner — itinerary by day with automatic meal-gap detection (arrival-night dinner, full-day meals, departure breakfast), a dedicated hotel section with booking references, and an OpenStreetMap view with venues geocoded automatically from their names.
- Seasons — one active (writable) season; every past year is a read-only archive. Starting a new season copies people and budgets forward with a clean slate of purchases. People are global identities with per-season membership, so pruning this year's list can never damage last year's history.
- The run-up calendar — September to December at a glance, weekends tinted, Christmas days highlighted, days already gone snowed over with a "you are here" marker (plus sleeps-until-Christmas and shopping-weekends-left counters).
- Gift idea bank — a cross-year backlog per person ("spotted this in July"), promotable into the active season's list with one click. Ideas about you stay invisible to your login, naturally.
- Delivery nudges — expected-by dates on orders, due/overdue chips, and a "still in transit" dashboard card so nothing's stuck in a depot on the 23rd.
- Christmas card list — who gets a card, sent/received ticking, carried forward season to season. Postal addresses are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM, key outside the database — see Privacy below).
- Season summary & exports — a printable year-in-numbers recap, plus CSV exports of purchases and the card list. Year-over-year sublines on the dashboard once you have a second season.
- Cosy by design — hand-drawn snowy rooftops, fairy lights, and a festive display face… all behind a per-user whimsy switch for when you want it calm.
- Fully responsive: desktop tables, mobile cards and bottom-tab navigation.
| Dashboard | City break planner |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Purchases | Mobile |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Next.js 16 (App Router, server actions) · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS 4 ·
Prisma 7 on SQLite (better-sqlite3 — no database server to run) · next-auth v5
with Google sign-in gated by an email allowlist · Leaflet + OpenStreetMap +
Nominatim for the trip map · Docker Compose for deployment.
The app is a single container; the SQLite database lives in a named volume and migrations run automatically on boot.
git clone https://github.com/MarkRWatts/JingleJotter.git
cd JingleJotter
cp .env.docker.example .env.docker # then edit: secrets + your allowed emails
docker compose up -d --buildLocal dev instead: npm install, copy .env.example to .env, then
npx prisma migrate dev, npx prisma db seed, and npm run dev
(port 3003).
Create an OAuth client in the Google Cloud console
(type "Web application") with redirect URIs for
http://localhost:3003/api/auth/callback/google and
https://your-domain/api/auth/callback/google, put the client ID/secret in your
env file, and list the Google account emails allowed to sign in as a
comma-separated ALLOWED_EMAILS. While the OAuth consent screen is in Testing
mode, add those same accounts as test users.
| Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|
AUTH_SECRET |
Session encryption — openssl rand -base64 32 |
AUTH_GOOGLE_ID / AUTH_GOOGLE_SECRET |
The OAuth client above |
ALLOWED_EMAILS |
Comma-separated allowlist of Google accounts |
AUTH_URL |
The app's canonical external URL |
DATABASE_URL |
SQLite path (defaulted in compose to the data volume) |
PII_ENCRYPTION_KEY |
Address encryption — openssl rand -base64 32 |
Reverse-proxy TLS, backups (the database is one file — archive the volume), and DNS are yours to taste; any HTTPS-terminating proxy in front of port 3000 works.
The in-app privacy notice (served at /privacy) is the
summary of the app's data-handling posture. The short version:
- Minimal by design — names, gift/budget details, and (only if you use the card list) card recipients' names and postal addresses. Nothing else about anyone.
- Addresses are encrypted at rest — AES-256-GCM via
PII_ENCRYPTION_KEY, which lives only in your env file: the SQLite file and its backups alone can't reveal an address. Losing the key loses stored addresses (only) — keep it safe, keep it out of git. - Nothing phones home — no analytics, no third-party storage. The only outbound calls are Google sign-in and OpenStreetMap lookups of trip venue names; personal addresses are never geocoded and never appear in URLs or logs.
- Erasure & portability — contacts and their addresses hard-delete in-app, and each season's purchases and card list export as CSV.
One household running this for itself sits under GDPR's household exemption; the above is good practice regardless, and a starting point if you host it for anyone beyond your own kitchen table.
GPL-3.0-or-later. Built with care (and a considerable quantity of mulled wine metaphors) for one household's Decembers — shared in case it makes yours merrier too.