The Holiday Season: When you do not have money you have relationships

Today was a fruitful day for thinking along the lines of getting through difficult times.

The holiday season is coming. Or maybe it is here already.

What is likely going to make this holiday season worse this year is that money is tight for many people. Christmas is supposed to be a time for gift giving and extravagance.

There is such an intensity (especially in U.S. society) around the holidays. You are to have a cozy and warm Thanksgiving. You are to have a festive and merry Christmas. You are to have a happy new year.

There is all kinds of talk about what you are going to do, what you are going to buy, and where you are going? There are all kinds of decorations and clothing. There are special foods for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There are all kinds of special events.

The intensity is fueled by nonstop Christmas muzak in all kinds of stores starting after Halloween. The countless broadcast commercials and print advertisements seem to start earlier and earlier each year. A neighborhood store put out its Christmas displays three weeks ago before Halloween.

The intensity adds pressure to the expectation out there is that you should have a merry Christmas. The problem is that most people do not expect a merry Christmas for one reason or another.

The holiday season is a sad and depressing time where there are actually a lot of suicides. People feel abandoned and alone.

I have likened holidays to hurricanes. Everyone gets ready for weeks to run home, lock the door and wait for the storm to pass. They talk about it and get all kinds of survival gear to make sure they have what they need. Holidays have not exactly been joyful.

I have been analyzing the holiday season for some time. Why has it become the un-ignorable monster?

My first thought is a rather Marxian one: it has been exploited in the name of economics. Too much of the retail economy has become dependent on Christmas sales. Christmas is no longer holy or set apart as a sacred time.

However, my first thought is counter-acted by the second thought. Even if it is a sacred time, Christmas is not a magical time that is going to provide fulfillment to erase all of the pain we feel in this world. I have came to the conclusion that many people are nostalgic and looking for magic. Little children in their limited cognitive ability see the magic. Adults want that magic feeling, but the sad tragedy is that there is a bliss in the ignorance that little kids have.

Third, no matter how much nostalgia, the reality is that most of us have family members who are highly dysfunctional who will ruin holiday gatherings and any shot at nostalgia. We get tense and they get tense as we have ruminated over our fears that the other family member is going to just wreck things.

Anyway with all of those problems, to get a feeling of magic, people spend money. Maybe there is a sense of magic in the giving and getting of presents and feasting. We gain weight and usually pay credit card bills way off into April or May. We will buy the cans of diet shake power that are out there front and center in the stores in January where the Christmas candy used to be the month before.

Well, this year the money will not be there. If at best we will have the relationships. The relationships matter where you can have them.

I move that we all start a tradition that is cheap. It would be best that the tradition does not cost money.

The traditions that we have are not about themselves, but about the relationships in which we share the traditions. Good traditions exude love and laughter and meaning. Good traditions honor our relationships.

If your family is not going to be available for traditions this year, find someone to do something with to start a cheap tradition. When you do not have the money, you have the relationships--that is if you look for them.

More to come . . .