In light of the ailing economy and a general tendency to overspend on gift giving, I cut back on my Christmas spending this year. Still, my budget mounted to over a grand. Now, for some of you, spending one thousand dollars on Christmas gifts may be totally within the realm of reasonable spending. But for us, a thousand bucks is $200 more than our monthly mortgage payment. Okay, so we live in a cheap house and have a cheap mortgage payment but the point is that one thousand dollars is still a large amount of money.

Every year I vow to spend less at Christmas. What’s the point of buying all these gifts anyway? I mean, the whole holiday is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. If an alien came to our planet at Christmas and wanted to know what all the hullabaloo was all about, we would have to explain to him that we are celebrating the birth of Jesus, one of our religious icons. Except that Jesus wasn’t actually born on Christmas day. The Christians took over what they perceived to be a threatening pagan holiday that celebrated the winter solstice and wrapped their own worldview around it. Today we celebrate Christmas by bringing live conifers into our homes, decorating them with lights and ornaments, eating copious amounts of food, and getting gifts from a fat man in a red suit with a long white beard who comes down the chimney and flies through the air in a sleigh led by reindeer. Hmm, makes perfect sense!

If you aren’t religious, the holiday is distilled into one long orgy of overspending, overeating, and overstimulation. How to make meaning out of all this? The answer this year came from my husband, an elementary school teacher in an economically challenged district.

At the yearly Santa’s Gift Shop organized by the Parent Union, students in my husband’s school can buy inexpensive gift items for friends and family. One boy burst into tears because he was only able to afford two small gifts. To help redirect attention away from the pressure to buy, buy, buy, my husband decided to have his students make coupon books for their parents. Kids thought of jobs they could do to help the family, like doing dishes, giving a warm hug, vacuuming, cleaning the garage or attic, or walking the dog for a week. I think this is a great way for kids to make Christmas meaningful for themselves and their families.

Another way we were able to feel good about Christmas spending was to help one of my husband’s students with holiday gifts. During a school assignment to write a persuasive letter to Santa, it became clear to my husband that one little girl in his class was upset about the Christmas gift giving. A visit to the school counselor revealed that her father is AWOL and her mother is out of work after a recent surgery. The teachers collected money for the family so they can buy food and necessaries and then each bought individual gifts for family members. For someone who had no clue what to buy a nine-year-old girl, my husband did a great job picking out gifts. He hit the Target express and found a hooded sweatshirt lined with faux fur, a Hannah Montana cosmetics case and microphone, and a scarf and mittens. My son helped pick out these items and we made sure he knew that the family had no money and had difficulty purchasing food and clothing. (Yes, we are trying to get him to understand how lucky he is to live in a home with parents who can pay the bills and still have enough left over for gifts. I’m pretty sure he won’t appreciate this until he has kids of his own, but we try.)

The extra money we spent on gifts for this family in need took us even farther over budget, but somehow I’m okay with that. In fact, I’d really like to do it again next year. Not that I don’t love buying things for my son, but the satisfaction of purchasing an item for someone who really needs it far exceeds that of adding another toy to our already overflowing collection. I think we may have discovered a way to not only survive the holiday blitz, but to make meaning of the Christmas craziness.

Last 5 posts by OrganizerMom

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