I'm watching the Christmas commercials with a jaundiced eye.

All of the diamond commercials, the "no interest" credit card deals if you pay within 18 months, the Black Friday predictions, the "buy your spouse a car for Christmas?!" Really, people? A car? I don't know if it's just me. Is it because we are empty-nesters? Is it because we are budget-conscious? Is it because so many people we know are struggling helplessly in this deep, deep recession?

Would it hurt to take a break from Christmas for just one year? 

We're not even getting a tree this year. For the first time in my life, from dreamy New England Christmases growing up, then celebrating the season raising my son, I will not partake in the Christmas rituals that have defined every December of my life for 50 years. There will be no gift buying, no mailing out of Christmas cards. I won't be decorating a tree with old and new ornaments.

In fact, I watch the endless frantic commercials trying to sell me the old Christmas idea that I must buy many gifts and it seems foreign, odd even. Like an obsolete idea struggling not to die.

This year is all Jimmy Stewart and It's a Wonderful Life. In a weird way. Yes the banks all crashed but then got resucitated by the Government and they and the credit cards companies learned nothing, continuing to treat the American public nastily and with entitlement. The retail establishment will not be able to absorb this years losses and come January, there will be a lot of bankruptcies and closing of stores around the country. Retail depends on Christmas spending to keep it in the black for the rest of the year. 

We're out of money. The American Government. The American citizen. There is no money for diamonds or gadgets or cars or ipads. This Christmas will be about friends and family, a quiet event marked with faith and reflection, no ostentatious frivolity. It's a Christmas ritual famine, one we need to go through to come out the other side and see where we end up. 

My grandparents celebrated Christmas rummaging through stockings for oranges and candies. Warm chestnuts, hot cider. My own parents had frugal Christmases under the stern eye of a generation who had weathered the Great Depression. Christmas was about family and a church service and the singing of carols. But in a mere 50 years in America it has turned into an insatiable, mawkish display of materialism. We won't even have Christmas lights this year, no feast, just a Christmas fast. Gorging ourselves and opening countless gifts rings hollow to me.

The Christmas fast is for our soldiers, the foreclosed upon, the unemployed, the broke. These frantic commercials are obsolete; urging us to buy, buy, buy to a citizenry who can't pay the bill come January. 

[I wrote this exactly one year ago and it is just as true today as it was then.]