Grandma’s Nativity: A little story for my country that spent around a trillion dollars on Christmas this year.
It’s an early December tradition here at Woodshed Manor to pull out my grandmother’s Nativity scene. I don’t know how old it is except I’m 68 and it’s older than me. Grandma herself passed on decades ago at 92 and she bought it when she was a young working woman.
They didn’t have credit cards in her day. Back then, what a person did when they wanted something they couldn’t afford at the store was, they put it on ‘layaway’. Back then, this woman who worked all her life, never missed a day, and was making 65 cents an hour when she retired, saw this manger scene that graces our bookshelf today, and loved it. No way she could pay for it on her salary, so she put it on layaway and with every paycheck she bought another piece.
Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, Joseph, the camel, the ox, the donkey, sheep, ram, ducks, the shepherds with their offerings, the Three Wise Men—hey wait—one of the Wise Men is black(!) That guy may not grab your attention in these politically correct times but for a kid in 1960’s New Hampshire during the remote northeast rumblings of the Civil Rights era, a kid who’d never seen a live black person, that wise man was a character to think about. He was one of the Magi who understood what Christ was about before almost anyone, followed the star, and figured out how to dodge Herod by going home another way. A black guy. How ‘bout that?
There’s also the plaster dog whose leg’s been missing at least 60 years. It could have been me that broke it, though I think I’d remember. There were angels in the manger, too. There used to be three. One of them disappeared long since. Flew up to heaven, I suppose. A few years ago, one of our kids, came across a Nativity angel in an open air market in Barcelona. He brought it home to rise at the apex of the manger. Grandma would love that.
In 2011 I wrote ‘Make a Thousand,’ a brief survey of American spending habits. This country spent $469.1 billion on Christmas that year which, at the time, didn’t seem possible. But now, just twelve years later, we spent about a trillion. That’s more than the GDP of most countries. America’s national debt didn’t even reach one trillion dollars until 1982. To be fair, a lot of us buy the family things they need: flannel shirts, a hot water bottle, Christmas dinner, or maybe not much at all and make a donation to someone who needs the money more than us. But still, a lot of us overdo it to the point we go into debt that takes months to pay off.
In a way, American families are mirroring the degenerate spending of our Federal Government. When my grandmother bought her Nativity our national debt was under $500 billion. Now it’s closing on $23 trillion and rising at over a $ trillion per year. Americans look at that and think to themselves, “Well, debt isn’t such a bad thing after all.”
Yes, it is. Debt is bad. It used to be an anathema. People hated to be in debt. Now credit cards, about a quarter of American s go willingly deeper into debt for Christmas shopping to buy stuff people don’t want or need, with money they don’t have. As we come out of the post-holiday spending hangover and think about how to dig ourselves out of debt as individuals and families, part of the plan might be that we develop a layaway mentality of buying what we can’t afford in an incremental plan. If we have to put things on layaway, we’ll be more likely to hold Washington, D.C. accountable for digging the country out of debt.
