Christmas is poorly timed, financially speaking, for our family.
It’s smack in the middle of grey mode – the period from October to January when my hours drastically drop at work and money becomes tight. This also extends until April somewhat as my hours slowly ramp up and I try to recover from the harshest parts of grey mode. I’ve spoken about this at length in the past so I won’t go into extreme detail here.
Although I suppose in a way it’s a good thing as it keeps my generosity in check – if Christmas happened in September everyone on my list would have gotten Wiis long ago. Don’t laugh; I got consoles for my mom and Burton in the past.
Anyways, this Christmas season is particularly challenging because we had some huge car issues crop up right at the end of November. Since November 30th I’ve had to shell out over $600 on the car and we still need new tires – a minimum expense of another $130. Now about $40 of that was expected as part of regular oil change and other maintenance so we’re looking at about $690 of unbudgeted expense in the middle of grey mode.
What kind of Christmas could you give your family on $690? A pretty decent one I should think. How far would $690 go in day-to-day expenses like groceries?
Suffice to say we’ve had to tighten our belts with regards to entertainment and eating out but soon after we got our first repair estimate the question was put to me: “Does this mean we should cut back on Christmas?”
Well that’s a hell of a question. It’s pragmatic and practical, fiscally responsible – everything I am. And also completely wrong.
First I should clarify we’re not standing on the edge of an abyss here. I’ve got savings and investments; we have some measure of financial security. Worst case we don’t go to London for my 30th birthday but instead go to Orlando or Las Vegas. We’re not one of those families hit hard by the recession – we haven’t seen our hours go down, lost our jobs, or even had our benefits decrease. In fact the only thing the recession did was limit my raise and keep Mindi from getting hers. We may one day be in such a place where we have to choose between essentials (over my dead body) but that day is several years off barring severe unforeseen circumstances. But nevertheless there the question was. I generally try to do things in a financially sustainable way – do things we can afford that only temporarily dip into our savings. Suddenly things didn’t seem so sustainable. It’s not that uncommon a concern during grey mode but I always pull a rabbit out of my hat somewhere and we recover. But what if I’m starting to run out of rabbits?
Then I realized that the question I had to answer wasn’t “should be cut back on Christmas?” and I already had the answer to the real question.
There is a wartime story that may to some degree be apocryphal or distorted but it goes like this. During one of the darkest moments of World War II Winston Churchill was asked by a reporter if he would cut funding to the arts in order to fund the war effort to which he famously replied “my god man, what do you think we’re fighting FOR?”
I had my answer to that question.
“What do you think we’re fixing the car FOR?” I responded. No cut backs on Christmas. The whole reason in my mind for fixing the car, the heart of the matter or the motivation if you prefer, was to drive to my mom’s place for Christmas dinner. That’s why I was fixing the car, my family could get by on transit if they had to.
So we cut back on entertainment and eating out, busting open some old cans of soup and Chef Boyardee for dinner here and there and digging our way into the back of the pantry which frankly we need to do more often anyways. But there still seemed to be this specter of financial difficulty looming over us. My Christmas spirit is pretty robust and we continued putting up the tree and slowly sending out some Christmas cards and doing a little Christmas shopping here and there but we still seemed to be timing things carefully towards our pay days. Then today when I was doing some manual labour at work and listening to some Christmas songs I was reminded why I have rules about no cut backs at Christmas when an Amy Grant song came on my mp3 rotation…
“Let’s take a walk downtown
And go dream shopping in the mall
Kids can do the Santa thing
And photographs and all
You’ll get the biggest tree this year
And trim it to the top
And spend a whole lot more than what we got
But so what?”
This is why things like Christmas songs are important – they’re nice and remind us of good times in years past but they also remind you of what’s important.
Well, I’ve been reminded.
Worrying about money can wait for the New Year.
It’s like by having that mp3 it was a message embedded in my playlist from me of the past to keep me on the right path.
Christmas is about joy, generosity, and the incongruous viewing of Die Hard, not bitching about money.
Merry Christmas everyone.
See you in the checkout lines at the mall.