'Tis The Season... To Spend!

A lot of people think of Christmas as a time to spend, and for ages we've heard the other people decry the commercialization of the season.  I'm somewhere in-between.  While there's nothing wrong with the mad shopping sprees and the spirit of giving, there are some aspects of the practice that get out of hand and go beyond common sense.

Too many people spend what they don't have.  You see them scrimping and saving all year, so they can buy everything all at once, or worse, they max out their credit cards and spend the next eleven months paying them off (or not).  All this, just so they can say they bought a gift for every last person they can think of.  This isn't something I would ever do, but that's just me.

In my household, we buy what we can afford when we can afford it, and we don't wait until a special time of year to get our stuff.  If it's something we can use and we have the money, we get it.  If that happens to be July, we don't stuff the thing in a box and hide it away until December 25.  That may mean the tree doesn't have as many presents, but we feel its worth having the months of enjoyment of things, rather than the thrill of a massive pile of stuff at the end of the year.  There are always some gifts under the tree, but it's not a huge mountain of gifts.  Those are already in-use.

In these hard economic times, a lot of people are considering a more frugal spending policy this year, but others will no doubt enjoy their Christmas shopping as usual.  Feel free to buy what you want, but do try to be sensible.  If you need to mortgage your house for that new big-screen, it might be time to seek therapy...  But before you do, make sure you buy every one of my books from Amazon.com or my AuthorStore!  (Yeah, that's shameless, but if they're going to spend the money anyway, they should at least have the courtesy to send some my way.  Forget the white; make mine a green Christmas!)