It’s the Christmas season, the season for giving, and the crashed world economy has given rise to headlines like this one from the Yahoo! homepage: "No Christmas cheer as recession gathers steam."
No Christmas cheer?! The headline and the article that follows it clearly make the assumption that Christmas cheer for everyone involves booming housing markets, low gas prices, and hours spent pounding the pavement (or waxed tile floor) doing Christmas shopping. In other words, dollar signs. 
I ain’t no Christian, and Yashka’s birthday has been off my calendar for a long time, but I still remember some of the good times I used to have with my family at (our very secular) Christmastime. One year in my late teens or early twenties, the family decided (to the chagrin of my Jewish father) to discontinue the gift exchange. It had been a source of stress and annoyance for years, during which we tried drawing names and imposing spending caps, none of which made the holiday any more enjoyable. So one year we eliminated presents completely. Problem solved.
Was our celebration any the poorer? Au contraire. We poured ourselves into the non-material features of the season: listening to music, dedicating the breakfast table to puzzle assembly, clipping evergreen and holly sprigs from the trees in our yard and decorating every available surface, baking holiday treats (my mother’s homemade Heath bars were particularly addictive), watching the Queen’s annual Christmas address to her subjects in which she says she looks forward to serving them in the coming year ("I should like that," I always told the television), and my favorite, choosing an 8-foot Douglas fir at the Boy Scouts’ tree lot, putting it into its stand, and decorating it with decades worth of accumulated ornaments. The best part of the whole shebang for me was turning off the lights, lying on the couch nursing a glass of Bailey’s, gazing at the lights and inhaling the aroma of Oregon’s most glorious conifer.
Did we miss the gifts? Not one bit. (Okay, my dad broke the rule one year and bought everyone monogrammed stationery, but other than that, we stuck by it.) What we came to rely on for making the season festive was what mattered in the first place: being together and enjoying what we already had. Americans are incredibly spoilt, and all too often forget that what they consider the necessities of life are things hardly anyone else on the planet enjoys. Nothing gets up my nose worse than when one of my girls throws a tantrum or sulks because she doesn’t get something new that she wants. Some kids in America and Israel have more than they have, but most here—and everywhere else in the world—have less, a fact of which I don’t hesitate to remind them.
So my advice to anyone who thinks that this holiday season is not what it should be—i.e. a commercial orgy—is to sit back and re-evaluate what really matters. Perhaps this holiday season is a good time to turn OFF the news that seems determined to bring ill tidings to everyone, and put on some good music, or watch a great movie. Some of my favorites include How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, Holiday Inn, the Christmas specials of The Vicar of Dibley and Good Neighbors (hilarious British sit-coms), and my new favorite grown-up movie for the season, Love Actually, in which Christmas is merely a backdrop to the surprising development of some relationships, and much-needed jump-start for others.
Perhaps it’s a good year to give Santa Claus a holiday, and do it for ourselves.
Shimshonit 
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