My family has a tradition. Five years old, maybe a bit more or less. It doesn't matter, but I'll say five.  You can't fact check this.

 We don't give Christmas gifts to adults. Period. We have a tree, and spend Christmas Eve and Day together, but we do not give gifts. There is no Christmas shopping, except that which my parents do to give gifts to their godchildren and my mother, to her students. 

We figured - there is no dearth of stuff in any of our lives. No absence of things needed, no impossibility of obtaining things desired. Gifts become absent gestures - a holiday exchange of wrapped things that we might not have bought ourselves. Absent gestures that cost money and time.

So what we do, instead, is bake cookies. We get together on Christmas Eve, and we bake many many many cookies, and drink a great deal of red wine, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. And we spend Christmas Day dropping them off. 

This is a radical gesture in these economic times. We are told, as a public, that we should root for the consumer confidence index. That we should be offended at the declining credit limits on our plastic. That we should go and spend and pump dollars through the economy. We should also root for real estate prices to go up. The death of the buyer's market. 

We are told that these are the factors that will heal the economy. We are told that this will signal recovery. But we have seen this recovery before - 

"the jobless recovery."

"the real estate bubble."

I read something I'd link to if I remembered where it was. The statistic was that real wages have been flat for decades - but that the standard of living kept rising, along with the cost of living, because of the increase in consumer credit that drove spending. We have replaced wages with credit. We replaced jobs with spending. We were told that real estate was increasing in value - when really, it wasn't the value that was increasing, just the price of housing.  Then the bottom fell out - and people can't pay their debts. People can't pay for their houses.  People can't pay their student loans.  Why? Because when you replace money with credit, and wages never do rise - this is what has to happen.

And now they're telling us that the way out is to do it again. 

Spend, don't save. Buy, for America. Buy homes. Buy goods. Buy college educations. And forget your job insecurity. Forget the credit balance that grows, and grows, and grows - forget the fact that you may never pay it off.

Consumer spending is not a sustainable way to drive an economy. Wages are the only sustainable way. So stay home.

Bake cookies with your loved ones.  Shovel snow in the winter for people who don't have the time or the health. Babysit for people who haven't gotten out in a while. Get drunk with your mom, and find out what her favorite curse word was when she was twenty. 

Figure out how to make donuts, and then bring them to people  who have never had homemade donuts.   If you've done donuts, try bagels. Or pretzels.

Throw eggs at your sister.  Drink gin with your brother. Find out what someone's favorite book is, read it, and then talk with them about it. 

 We've been taught that things are worth more than our time. That is what our gift-giving culture says; that's what our flat wages say. So fuck it.  Turn it inside out.  Take a stand. 

Don't give gifts this christmas.* 

It is a radical thing. It is a dangerous thing. It is a wonderful thing.  Steal my tradition. Make it yours. You may never go back.

*To adults.