Selphiras wrote a thoughtful review of Skipping Christmas last year. Click on the word “review” to read it — though she does give you the whole plot, so you may want to wait till you’ve read it yourself.
The thing that surprised me in the review was that this book had been recommended to her as an example of frugality.
The Kranks (the Christmas skippers in the book) are not frugal. Frugality is not even the point of the book, though Grisham does devote a couple of pages to enumeration of the things that made up the startling $6,100 they spent on the previous year’s celebration. But they refuse to do things that are free (welcoming carolers, decorating with items they already own, attending the company holiday dinner) and instead do other things that are costly (tanning booths, buying cruise gear they do not intend to wear). In fact, since Luther Krank uses his company’s time and paper to prepare announcements that he will not be celebrating, he is not even showing fiscal responsibility or honesty in general, let alone actual frugality at Christmas.
If you were looking for a book that made a good point about frugal living and the holidays, Skipping Christmas would not be it. Try How the Grinch Stole Christmas — not the Jim Carey movie, which got the whole thing backwards, but the original from Dr. Seuss.
“It came without packages, boxes, or bags!… Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before: Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
I’m quoting this from memory, having read the book or watched the TV cartoon version every single year of my life, so I may have a word wrong, but the point is there.
Another option would be The Hundred Dollar Holiday. This excellent little book points out that our Christmas customs date from a time when a feast, a party, a bunch of noise and company, and store-bought trinkets were rarities. Now, the rare and special things are quiet, peacefulness, free time, and handmade things. Author Bill McKibben proposes that we change our celebrations to reflect the change in our society.
Unplug the Christmas Machine would be another good choice. Online resources include the Society to Curtail Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchange, Alternatives for Simple Living, and Buy-nothing Christmas.
I love Christmas, myself, and would never want to skip it. But I do see a lot of people who are miserable at the holidays for one reason or another. People get overwhelmed, overextended, and overstressed.
Frugality and simplicity at Christmas fortunately doesn’t require skipping the holiday. It takes resistance to peer pressure and media pressure, and it takes advance preparation, if only a conversation with the people you celebrate with to determine what parts of the celebration are the most important.
I’ve had that conversation with my kids every year since they were old enough to understand the question, and sometimes I’ve been surprised. Going to see the lights on the square and the annual shopping-for-siblings trip have both been listed as the most important thing in the past. Presents are important to children — they do not have the resources to buy those things for themselves, after all — but they don’t have to be the center of the holiday.
The cost, time crunch, and stress of the holidays are the main complaints from those who suffer at this time of year, but they are not inevitable. A budget and a calendar can help. A sense of perspective can, too. We are not really going to be beset with attack carolers, but there is a lot of pressure to match last year, or the celebrations of our friends, or even what we see in the magazines (the HGP recommends avoiding all holiday issues of magazines for just this reason). I have been stressed out at Christmas myself, in years past, though I don’t have that problem any more.
But there are other sources of holiday unhappiness that sometimes get mixed up with those things.
One is unhappiness about the people we spend our holidays with. The Kranks have a long Christmas card list, but they don’t seem to have anyone they actually want to see at the holidays, except their daughter. Sometimes the Stage 3 shoppers (the unhappy, stressed ones we see in mid-December) can’t keep themselves from talking about how they dislike or disapprove of the kids they are buying toys for, or their parents.
We don’t get issued a new set of family or friends for the holidays. If they are not perfect the rest of the year, they aren’t going to turn into the ones we see in magazines on Thanksgiving day. And the ones in the magazines aren’t really perfect, either. They just get paid to look that way for a few seconds while the picture is snapped.
So I have one more holiday book to recommend: The Perfect Thanksgiving by Eileen Spinelli. This is the story of two families. One has perfect food for Thanksgiving, and a peaceful meal followed by long walks and chess games. The other has mess and crisis and down-market amusements. Where holiday magazines would tell us that the first family is perfect and the second is imperfect — and lots of “don’t feel guilty” columns would tell us that the second is the perfect one because it is somehow more authentic — this children’s book says that both, and indeed all, families are just fine the way they are. And I think that would be true even if your holiday family is you and your friends, or you and your cat, or just you.
That “just you” is the other holiday problem. I remember the only really sad Christmas I ever had: the first year that I couldn’t be with my family for the holidays. I was pretty sorry for myself, as I recall. Fortunately, by the next year I had decided for myself what Christmas traditions I wanted, and I was able to enjoy them by myself or with friends, even though I couldn’t be with my family. Since then, my holidays have been — in the sense in which Eileen Spinelli means it — perfect.
And if it isn’t perfect, it cannot be made perfect by buying the things the perfect magazine family is modeling.
I do not want to be in Xmas mode yet. Holding out as long as I can…
I’m crying over this post.
But also I have a fear of ending up toothless, single, and homeless, asking passersby for a down-payment on a cheeseburger.
Christmas is my favorite time of the year, too — most especially the part where my family comes to my house to celebrate with me and my husband. [Except when there are icestorms and alternative arrangements have to be made — but that doesn’t happen often.]
I have a few relatives who carry around a Christmas Burden that goes like this: “You can tell how much somebody loves you by whether they spend as much for your Christmas present as you spend for their Christmas present.” Which of course has as one of its underlying premises the idea that amount of love is equivalent to amount of money spent, period. That CB will spoil Christmas for you, for sure, and turn it into a contest; I’m blessed that almost everyone I celebrate with each year is free of it.
The one advantage of having an artificial Christmas tree instead of a real one is that I can put it up and decorate it on December 1st and leave it up until January 2nd, which is what I do. And if I lived in a big old house with a spare room, I’d just put it away in the spare room on January 2nd, all ready for the following year — because at my age, Christmas comes again so quickly that it seems totally ridiculous to have taken the tree down and put the decorations away. I just do that, and immediately it’s time to put the tree up and decorate it. Lovely.
Our Chrismas used to start with Mum giving us $5 to spend on Christmas presents (because we didn’t get pocket money during the year) and then, in the last week of the school year we’d get a day off school and she would take us all Christmas shopping. It was a tradition for as long as one of us was at school (the last year would’ve have been 1979 when my sister was 15). We’d go to the biggest dept store in town which used to have a section set aside especially for those who had only a little money to spend. There would be 1$, 2$, 5$ and $10 sections. Mum and Dad got a lot of handkerchiefs and socks over those years 🙂 For years there was also the Pixietown clockwork display at Christmas and we would always go to that as well. The rest of the week leading up to Chrismas, excitement would mount and on Christmas Eve my brother’s bed would be moved into my sister and mine room – ‘cos Christmas morning was better with 3 of you than with 2 – Mum and Dad would try to keep us up late -the one day of the year we were allowed to stay up late – and of course the one day of the year we didn’t want to stay up late – and eventually some sort of compromise would be reached and we’d go to bed later than usual but not as late as our parents wanted us to. The Christmas morning rule was that we were not allowed to turn the lights on if it was till dark when we woke up but we were allowed to feel around in the Santa sacks to try and discover what we had got from Santa. (One of my happiest memories is finding something soft and furry in the sack that turned out to be a koala bear – I still have that bear, it’s 37 yrs old!) Once dawn broke we were allowed to go and wake Mum and Dad up and show them our presents – of course they were always as surprised as we were at what we got 🙂 My brother would then be sick because he always ate all the sweets and fruit in his sack before breakfast. My aunt would come over for Christmas dinner at noon and before we started eating we would open the presents under the tree… and by evening the 3 of us would be worn out and quite ready to go to sleep to get ready for Boxing Day which was the day that the rest of the relatives and friends were likely to come down and feast with us on Christmas leftovers.
The ‘sack’ was often a pillow slip although I do remember actual ‘santa sacks’ for one or two Christmases – sort of large, tough paper sacks. When we were kids fruit wasn’t as easy to get as it is now so one of the Christmas treats was a package with an orange, a huge red apple, a banana and dried fruit in it. We’d also usually get a small box of Cadbury’s chocolates, and a bag of some type of boiled lollies I think. You can see how Li’l Brother could make himself sick eating all of this before breakfast …. Boys!
Hooray! Perfect Christmas message! I love Christmas.