Trim your holiday spending
When I was young and the holidays approached, my mother liked to tell me a story about her childhood. During the Depression, she had received only one Christmas gift: a second-hand china-head doll given to her by a kind-hearted neighbour. In a twist of fate that seemed straight out of a Grimm's fairy tale, her kid brother broke the doll on Christmas Day.
"And then what happened?" I would ask. "Did you get a new one?"
"Of course not!" she'd snort. "It was hard times!"
This story always gave me a shiver of childish schadenfreude. "Doing without" defined Mom's childhood, but for me, the holidays meant writing up long wish lists using the Eaton's catalogue. And so, I grew up with two conflicting messages about Christmas: It is a time for brightly wrapped packages, and a time when sometimes you have to "make do."
Fast-forward 30-odd years, and both messages seem appropriate.
Unfortunately, holiday spending isn't simply about money. For many of us, it's about recapturing childhood memories and creating a cozy sense of security: A pile of presents is a way to reassure ourselves that we're okay. Under the weight of all this emotional baggage, how do we get off the spending treadmill—or at least slow it down?
Spending like it's 1999
Once upon a time, gifts were simple: bathrobes, books, bath salts. Then the digital revolution arrived, and with it, an annual avalanche of pricey MP3 players, video game systems, laptops and cellphones. New, must-have, high-tech gifts come out each year at this time, and we keep buying them. According to Moneris, one of the country's biggest credit/debit payment processors, Canadians have generally spent more than they did during the previous holiday shopping season for the past several years. Little wonder that, every January, many of us need a supersize bottle of ibuprofen when the bills come rolling in. Consider more retro gifts this year.
Staying out of the red is the new black
How do we just say no to overspending? "Over the years, I have nagged, wheedled and cajoled most of my friends into not exchanging Christmas presents, and still it ends up costing a bomb," says Diana Kiesners, 52, of Toronto. "Obviously, there has to be some degree of intimacy or goodwill for the non-gifting conversation to take place at all. The irony is, this means many of the people with whom I exchange gifts are people who are less than intimate friends."
Sandra Gould, a 48-year-old Torontonian, admits it can be hard to tell friends to stop spending on you so you can stop spending on them. "I've driven myself crazy buying gifts for people, just in case they buy gifts for me. I've decided to let that go, even if I find myself feeling embarrassed. It's the only way to break the cycle."
