I love the dark drive home through the tiny towns in Wisconsin and Minnesota on Thanksgiving weekend. This year a few yards were glowing with the newest Christmas decoration: a minivan-sized inflatable snowglobe brightly throwing its light and cheer all over the neighborhoods. One unpainted ramshackle place had not one, but three, of the huge, Christmas-scene baubles.
You really have to have a thing for Christmas to make a $150 yard decoration a priority. The beat-up house with the pricey decorations felt like a metaphor for the American Christmas to me. We overspend fiscally and emotionally in order to "be" Christmas, but our other resources become ragged and neglected. But then, that is our way.
Although my floor needs mopping, my bills need paying and I still haven't put away the garden hose from the last watering in August, I'm hot to get to the mall and make Christmas happen for my family. And, judging by the lack of parking spaces at the stores, I'm not the only one.
Are we this way because we just like to get new stuff or are we fulfilling some kind of societal norm for the proper behavior during the Christmas season?
Spending one's financial resources isn't the only drought that happens during the holidays.
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This is a dark season, most literally. Nature's change to more darkness and cold triggers a response in mammals to be home more and rest more -- to calm down after a busy harvest season.
We're mixed up, though. Instead of enjoying what we have, most of us are panting as we run from one event to another ... with depression and insomnia rates in middle-aged women higher than ever. We're spending money we don't have on things we don't need, using time and energy that should be being stored up, not used up.
Now, you're looking for a solution from me, a solution which doesn't cost much or demand much while leaving everyone (except the economic system) better off.
Well, I do have a great gift idea that might just work. I got this idea from my husband, Ernie, who once wrote down all the things he liked about me on tiny pieces of paper and hid them all over our house. Yes, very sweet.
I transferred this idea to Christmas one year.
Not knowing what new gadget to buy my 75-year-old dad for Christmas in order to show that I love him, I instead wrote down 52 things I love about him. Things I remembered him for. Things that people said about him. Things I had always thought but never really said.
I put the thoughts on 52 separate pieces of paper and put them in a pretty container. When he opened it, I told him that he needed to pull out one piece of paper a week throughout the next year.
He loved the gift, of course. He still pulls the papers out every week even though I gave him the gift a few years ago.
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But this doesn't solve the problem of gift-giving for your children. Children are not that "into" words of affirmation or warm feelings of giving. I'd love to tell you that my 10-year-old has decided to forgo Christmas presents this year in order to donate money for clean water in Africa.
But I would be lying in order to curry emotion.
My kids want presents. They want money spent on stuff for them. Plain and simple.
Where did they get this idea? From TV, sure -- but also from us.
We allow guilt to make us feel like we're not spending enough, doing enough or giving enough. Truly, though, human nature is never satisfied with stuff, no matter how much we have. Children don't have the sophistication to hide that dissatisfaction, so, no matter how much you give them for Christmas, there is always one more thing they would have liked. So don't try quite so hard. Give them love. Give them a little gift. Explain how you bought what you can afford.
No, that won't fix the desire for more gifts, but you will be giving them the gift of a rested, non-stressed you.
Don't overspend your resources this Christmas -- and, yes, Ernie, I am reading my own writing.
Monthly Budgeteer columnist S.E. Livingston is a wife, mother and teacher who writes for family and education newsletters in northern Minnesota (and lives in Duluth). E-mail her at selivingston68@yahoo.com .
