Reply to So, apparently it’s a low brow thing to spend a lot of money at Christmas?!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You people have so many issues. Christmas is about your family and your children, not signaling wealth or superior morals or minimalism to anyone else. I grew up getting about a dozen presents and my kids do, too. It’s fun to have one day where you are almost overwhelmed by the number of gifts. The chaos and magic of Christmas morning is very special to us. I couldn’t care less what you think that says about me or about my bank accounts.[/quote]

Thank you.[/quote]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/opinion/us-poverty.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
+1. Charles blow has a really nice op dc in the New York Times about growing up poor.

In the days before Christmas we loaded our meager things onto the flatbed of my grandmother’s husband’s pickup truck and ferried them across town to our new home. On Christmas Eve, as we stood in a nearly empty house, a call came. It was my grandmother calling from our new house.

She said Santa had just stopped there.

My brothers and I ran out of the house into the cold stillness of the night, jumped on our bikes and raced through the town’s streets toward the new house. My mother trailed us in the car, her headlights illuminating the way for us.

We burst into the house, eyes aglow, short of breath, mood electric. Gifts ringed the Christmas tree. Nothing major; we were poor.
My mother had worked at a poultry processing plant, dismembering chickens on an assembly line before getting a job as an office assistant at the high school, taking night courses to finish her degree and eventually landing a job as a teacher.

But that one salary had to finance a family of young boys in school and an old man who couldn’t work.

We struggled. Many of our toys came from foraging rummage sales or picking through heaps of trash at the city dump.

My mother, being a resourceful and industrious woman, planted and gardened and bought some pigs and a calf. We would be poor, but we wouldn’t be hungry. I think part of her determination to make our new life work was also to prove all the folks in town wrong: the one who warned that half-a-man was better than no man, the ones who thought my mother was trying to reach higher than her station.

That is how I grew up: working a garden and chasing runaway hogs that rooted out of their pen. I grew up watching my mother make quilts so that we wouldn’t catch a chill from the winds that whistled through the drafty house. I grew up watching my mother clipping coupons and stretching two bags of groceries over two weeks.

This Christmas, please remember the people like my family: the poor, the people whose lives took a turn, those starting over, the fractured families, those working hard but not quite getting ahead.[/quote][/quote]

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