With December
comes the “holiday season”. That’s the politically correct term for it. One
tries to be politically correct, but sometimes it’s a challenge. I send out
Christmas cards, but not as many as in years past. The postage can be
prohibitive, so it’s not an action to be taken lightly.
I try to be
sensitive if I am sending a card to someone who I know happens to hate organized
religion. There’re a few of them among my family and friends. So I have Santa
cards, and other cards that might just say, “Season’s Greetings”. And thinking
about it now, I realize how silly that really is, in a way.
Why would I
need to send a Christmas card to someone who doesn’t believe in Christmas?
People will answer that and say, well, you know, Morgan, it’s the polite thing
to do. And it is—of course it is. I can support that statement despite the fact
that no one has ever sent me a card for a single non-Christian holiday. Maybe
there aren’t any cards for Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or...whatever other non-Christian
holidays that in my ignorance, I’ve never heard of.
Conversely, I
don’t think I have ever personally heard anyone make a fuss if I wish them Merry
Christmas and they’re not Christian. Most people I know of different religions,
when I say “Merry Christmas”, respond with a “thank you”, and quite often, “and
the same to you”. Likely because they know that behind the words there is only a
wish for good things for them in the days to come.
I was very
pleasantly surprised last night as I was watching television—there were some
commercials where the advertisers actually said, “Merry Christmas”. Good. Let’s
not go all silly about what we call the holiday. Let’s call it what it is, and
then move on.
My favorite
thing about this time of year is giving. I love to give—sometimes much to
my beloved’s dismay. I was showing him the budget for Christmas that I’d worked
out on Monday, breaking down what was going to be spent and where. For a little
while he niggled, as he invariably does. To the tune of twenty dollars here,
twenty-five dollars there. Yes, yes, I believe in being frugal and I am most of
the year. For the most part.
Mostly.
But there comes
a point where frugality ends and miserliness begins, and my beloved was standing
on the far side of that line and looking like he might want to settle in for a
bit.
As has been
mentioned before in these words of mine, one of us is generous and one of us is
not. Compromise is key to the health of any marriage—even at Christmas. We do
take turns “winning” our way. So I told my beloved he was perfectly free to
disagree with me about the Christmas list, as long as he realized that in the
end, we were going to do things my way.
That came as no
surprise to him, and he even laughed.
There are other
gifts, of course, that he doesn’t argue over. There are charitable donations to
be made, and there are gifts related to my career—tokens of appreciation to my
professional colleagues and associates.
I am reminded
that it wasn’t so long ago that my beloved’s treasured personal philosophy won
the day just about every year. He used to tell everyone he shopped at the dollar
store. Twenty relatives, twenty dollars, twenty gifts. When you’re trying to
raise a family and there are sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and cousins
by the dozens that is absolutely the way to go.
But we are now
“dinks”. Do you remember that acronym from the eighties? It stands for “double
income, no kids”. For us, in my opinion, the meaning of that term is
clear.
Now that we are
dinks, we don’t need to be dinks about giving gifts at Christmas.
Love,
Morgan
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