Making cents of the Christmas season
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- December 16, 2023
- 1454
So I was listening to the radio the other day, hardly paying attention, when a voice cut through the haze and asked me, “Can you afford to retire with only half a million dollars in savings?”
The key word being “only.”
Immediately, I changed the station, because if there’s one thing in this life that I don’t need, it’s another reminder of how little I’ve managed to achieve. I felt like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when Mr. Potter tells him he’s worth more dead than alive.
It’s perhaps the best-loved Christmas movie ever made, and hardly anyone watching it can hold back tears when the townsfolk come to George’s aid after he’s reached rock bottom, giving what they can to help him through his darkest days and desperate nights.
It’s a rather bleak picture, actually, for a film that ends on such a happy and optimistic note, one that’s not often remembered for how melancholy most of what happens to George really is. Take, for example, the way he snaps at Tommy, his son, when he asks how to spell the word “frankincense” and his father explodes.
“How should I know? Do I look like a dictionary to you?”
I have to admit that when I first saw it, I laughed at that line, since by that time, I knew pretty much that I would never father any kids.
George hates the house his family lives in, calls it an old, drafty barn, and even goes so far as to demand from his wife an answer to a question nearly every spouse has asked of the other at some point.
“Why do we have so many children, anyway?”
It’s right up there with, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” from the Dickens’ classic, “A Christmas Carol.”
This is the time of year that can cut to the bone, leaving scars, a reminder that — to quote Ebenezer Scrooge again — we’re a year older and not a penny richer, an annual illustration of abject failure.
Charlie Brown says it well when, upon seeing a mailbox devoid of Christmas cards, he bemoans the fact that he knows no one likes him, so having a holiday to emphasize that fact seems rather cruel. It’s a wise, if hurtful, observation, one that has rung true ever since I saw the TV premiere of the cartoon, way back in winter 1964.
Two years later “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” debuted, introducing children to another animated outcast, one whose raison d’etre was to make those fun-loving denizens of Whoville suffer.
After pilfering all he believes makes the Whos happy, he pauses at the top of Mount Crumpit to savor their cries of misery.
But he discovers to his chagrin, “This sound wasn’t sad … this sound sounded glad.” Thus chastened, he returns everything to Whoville where “He himself, the Grinch, carved the roast beast.”
And … roll credits.
So that’s my Mount Rushmore of holiday specials: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Carol,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I’d list “Love Actually” for special mention as well as the “Twilight Zone” episode titled “The Night of the Meek” and “Mister Hankey, the Christmas Poo,” one of my favorite installments of “South Park.”
Many enjoy “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” though I find Chevy Chase’s portrayal of Clark Griswold to be cringe-worthy, while others will swear by “A Christmas Story,” with its “You’ll put your eye out” refrain, but I’m not fond of guns as a gift.
Back when I was a boy, just a little older than Ralphie Parker — the kid who wanted a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas — my parents enrolled me in what was called a “Christmas Club” at one of the downtown banks. The idea was if you deposited a quarter a week for an entire year, when it came to gift shopping, you’d have saved enough money to make the whole enterprise affordable.
This, of course, was prima facie ridiculous, a fantasy built on the notion that any pre-adolescent child would have the discipline to stash away fully half of his or her weekly allowance in order to ensure a smooth gift-buying experience come mid-December.
One year, though, I did try, and as proof, I still display a check for 50 cents, issued by the bank in my hometown from the year 1966.
If I’d have kept that account open all these years since, it might have accrued sufficient interest to be worth maybe 20 bucks now.
I could apply that tidy sum toward my retirement, though I’d still be just a bit behind a target of half a million, a total the radio commercial hinted still wouldn’t be enough to kick back in leisure.
So I keep the thermostat set at 65 F in the winter and use the window air-conditioner only when I can’t sleep on summer nights. I buy very few new clothes, hardly ever splurge on books or records and try to steer clear of anything resembling a luxury item.
I understand I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, that life gets harder the older one gets, and that the only way to survive is to subsist on and adhere to a strict budget.
It could be worse, though.
I still have a radio, one that allows me to enjoy Christmas music.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where “Carol of the Bells” is part of the soundtrack.