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Cynthetiq · 11-30-2008, 04:08 PM

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View: The Holidays Downsized: No Job and Fewer Gifts
Source: Nytimes
posted with the TFP thread generator

The Holidays Downsized: No Job and Fewer Gifts
November 30, 2008
The Holidays Downsized
No Job and Fewer Gifts
By JAN HOFFMAN
SUSAN McCABE liked to go all out for Christmas. Presents for friends and 17 relatives: high-end cameras for adults, Nintendo Wii for the children. On Christmas Eve, she proudly treated the immediate family to dinner at romantic white tablecloth restaurants in Manhattan. Sticker shock? Ms. McCabe, who sold eco-friendly technology, wouldn’t blink twice.

But in September, the start-up company she worked for went belly up.

A restaurant dinner? All those presents?

“Out of the question,” said Ms. McCabe, who is scrambling to make the rent on her Manhattan apartment. “And that really bothers me.”

In solidarity, Ms. McCabe’s sister, Robin, a lawyer, suggested a familywide ban on gifts for the adults. Then, to strike a tone more seemly for the times and her little sister’s circumstances, Robin reshaped her annual Brooklyn Heights holiday party: the sparkly, dressy affair will be a potluck gathering with a charitable component. It will feature clothing from Goods of Conscience, a new line sewn by Bronx seamstresses using fabric woven by Guatemalan women, who share in the profit.

Many people have a narrative about their holiday rituals: the worship, the setting, the food, the gifts, the personae, the drama. But this year, the economy is rudely tearing apart those yellowed scripts.

For millions, this is the first time they are compelled to scale back and reframe their holiday traditions.

Many must do so out of unaccustomed need and shame, some out of prudent apprehension. Others, like Robin McCabe, are retooling their annual blowouts in deference to those harder hit. The negotiations can be painful. At what cost preserving holiday magic for the children? The conversations are awkward not only for those who have lost their jobs but also for friends and relatives as they trip on that fine line between sensitive and patronizing.

But Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year’s all honor light in a dark season. Perhaps that is why people around the country, in describing how they are adjusting celebrations this year, speak of finding the upbeat in the downbeat — at least until the last scrap of wrapping paper is tossed.

Throughout middle-class Delaware County in suburban Columbus, Ohio, members of Liberty Presbyterian Church who once donated generously at Christmas now find themselves in the devastating position of having to receive, said Rev. Rebecca Hart, a pastor at the church. It was no accident that the Christmas recollections submitted for this year’s Advent calendar almost all speak to simpler, less extravagant times: The shoebox from home for a lonely sailor, filled with chocolates, a music cassette and a miniature Nativity scene; a father’s homemade carving of outdoor, life-size carolers; the year a defiant 10-year-old daughter refused the role of Mary in the Sunday School pageant, preferring Gabriel instead. (Bigger speaking part.)

“If you say, ‘We can’t afford to do the big Christmas this year,’ ” Ms. Hart said, “that makes you feel like you failed. But if you say you’re returning to your roots, to the Christmas of your grandparents, that’s powerful, that’s positive. That’s face-saving.”

Certainly many are recasting these pared-down celebrations as a return to the true meaning of the holidays. And although railing about commercialism has been a fine American tradition since at least 1965, when Charlie Brown first rescued that flimsy little evergreen, this is the year that hand- wringing and reality may finally meet.

Telling others that gifts, of necessity, will be modest is a ticklish business. Ellen Wachtel, a family therapist in Manhattan, said one-upmanship around presents is often frontloaded with unspoken tension, but the economy now gives cover to a blunt conversation. “You can say, ‘Please don’t give my kid such an elaborate gift because I can’t reciprocate.’ ”

Many of the newly affected choose to maintain their game faces by saying that simpler is not necessarily better. Just temporary.

In past years, the Christmases of Carl Sartori, a marketing and advertising manager from Bloomfield, N.J., had been joyously over-the-top celebrations. On Christmas morning, hordes would descend on his home to open presents. Mr. Sartori himself bought gifts for nearly 30 children.

But in October, Mr. Sartori was laid off.

The Thanksgiving dinner that Mr. Sartori hosts was trimmed back. The family’s supermarket savings card yielded a free turkey and ham. Relatives were asked to bring side dishes.

On Christmas morning, the horde of in-laws, as usual, will arrive for the great unwrapping. But only a scant few boxes in the pile will be from Mr. Sartori.

For now, Mr. Sartori, who will still appear at his daughter’s school and charity events as Santa’s rep in New Jersey, presents himself as an upbeat guy. This year is just a stumble, he says. His inability to buy gifts for children will not spoil his holiday. Wretched excess will make a comeback, he promised: “I’ll double up next year.”

Many others interviewed thought that the changes they were making this year were not detours, but new roads. Jean Craciun, who owns a market research firm in Anchorage, did well this year, but her partner’s Body Shop franchise faltered. Their family of four could not afford to fly to Minnesota to spend Thanksgiving with her partner’s extended clan, where adults typically pick names out of a hat for Christmas gift exchanges.

“Thanksgiving is becoming more about what we’re thankful for and what we can give,” said Ms. Craciun, who planned to stay in Alaska and volunteer with their young children at community programs.

They will send presents to nieces and nephews in Cleveland, whose parents are struggling. Adult-to-adult gifts won’t happen. “Once there’s a family member who can’t afford it, the tradition of the big family gift exchange has to go away,” she said. “The conversation has to be, ‘Let’s chip in together to pay attention to family members who are hardest hit and make sure the kids get gifts.’ ”

Ah, the children. Much of these holiday-related anxieties spring from fears that this special time will be blackened with the coal of gift deprivation. Daniel Cook, who teaches childhood studies at Rutgers, said: “In the last 20 years, not having an overabundant Christmas somehow became a sign of bad parenting.”

Most parents would prefer to sacrifice their own niceties, he said, to preserve the holidays as childhood’s signature magical sphere. But the children can handle a reduced holiday, psychologists say. Evan Imber-Black, a therapist in New York who writes about family rituals, said, “You can give children a sense of plentifulness in a different way than gifts under the tree.”

By giving a daughter earrings that her own mother gave her at that age, a mother reinforces family connections, Dr. Imber-Black said. By making a gift list and paring it down to one choice, children learn decision-making.

And even for the recently empty-handed, there can be positives.

The big Hanukkah parties always used to be at Randi Simko’s home in Farmington Hills, Mich., a comfortable suburb of Detroit: hundreds of latkes, dreidel hot pads, the house decked with blue-and-white dreidel lights, Star of David pasta and, of course, gifts all eight nights for the three children.

That was before the divorce and long before the house Ms. Simko bought from her ex-husband was lost to foreclosure. Two Hanukkahs ago, she had to turn to her congregation’s “No Temple Family Without Hanukkah” program.

“It was horrid for me,” recalled Ms. Simko, who now works three jobs. “I was embarrassed.” Needy members of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., submit a minimal gift list for their children, purchased anonymously by other congregants. “I didn’t tell my kids where it came from,” Ms. Simko said.

But like so many whose holiday traditions have been shredded recently, Ms. Simko, who has again applied to the program, realigned her attitude. “I had to stop pretending,” she said. “Last year I told the kids: I want them to understand there are good people out there doing good things.”

Many families will cling to their holiday traditions, because of, and in spite of, the year’s upheavals. Certainly, a Sioux Falls, S.D., grandmother has had her share: she and her husband lost weeks of wages, after both had strokes. Their towering medical bills perch atop a mountain range of debt. No Christmas gifts for the five grandchildren.

“They’re good kids,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified because she is mortified. “It hurts.”

But she will again make Grandma’s oyster stew. She will unpack all 40 of her Santas and put them on tabletops around the house.

And this year she expects a new ritual that she hopes will last. “At least we won’t be going into debt for Christmas,” she said. Having signed up for InCharge, a nonprofit debt management program, she no longer uses a credit card.

“This year when we see a plain white envelope in the mail box, it won’t be a late bill,” she said. “Maybe it will just be a late Christmas card.”

Are you planning on downsizing your spending this holiday season?

I gave up Christmas many years ago. I don't give gifts to friends or family on a regular basis, with the exception of children who cannot understand differently.

The only difference we've done is that we're not travelling this season. We didn't go away for Thanksgiving which is our normal travelling week overseas. Christmas we'll be in NYC as well, another change for us.