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Holidays 2005: Butler’s Dilemma
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Published: Jan 01, 2005
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Beyond Classification
Butler’s Holiday Dilemma
Mrs. B’s holiday cookies — a tradition for more than a decade — aren’t happening this year.
And if you’re waiting for a holiday card with a fetching photo of the little one, better send me an e-mail and I’ll reply with a jpeg of the kid.
What’s wrong?
More or less total absence of the holiday spirit.
Where we live — a neighborhood in New York where plenty is the rule — there’s every reason to dive into the holidays. Our neighbors are among the most attractive people in America: fit, well-dressed, awash in self-esteem. And successful? You bet — Wall Street bonuses are said to be astronomical this year. So shops are busy, the sidewalk is a thicket of shopping bags, limos are double-parked outside of restaurants.
Living here, it’s hard to relate to people fighting in Wal-Mart for a cut-rate DVD player. It’s difficult to believe that millions of middle-class Americans are so burdened by credit-card debt that they’re only a few missed paychecks from financial ruin. And it’s impossible to grasp that thirty-odd million Americans live below the poverty line, with millions of children going to bed hungry each night.
We don’t discuss politics on this site, but I don’t think it matters what your politics are — we can all agree that there’s plenty to be dispirited about. Iraq: We’re either killing too many people or not enough, and either way means heartbreak. Pakistan: Millions are living in tents and freezing, hundreds of thousands may starve this winter. The holocaust in Darfur goes on, mostly unreported. And that’s just the tip of the world’s suffering.
I look around and see well-informed Americans cheerfully ignoring these realities. I envy them. How lovely it must be to give generously to your loved ones and feel that the checks you write to charity each year balance your karmic debt! How terrific it must be not to feel obligated to every victim!
This year, for whatever reason, Mrs. B and I feel over-burdened by situations that, individually, we cannot hope to change. So we are buying ourselves exactly one costly present — a professional-grade espresso maker and an insanely expensive coffee grinder. But we’ve done the math, and it removes all guilt; in just four months, the money we save not buying triple grande lattes at Starbucks will pay for these machines.
After that whopper, everything else gets scaled back. There are children to buy for —including our own, who, as she approaches her fourth birthday, has developed actual consumer needs and preferences — and we will meet those obligations. Everyone else is getting small things: books, CDs, movies. I didn’t plan it this way, but Head Butler turns out to be a check list of cool stuff for everyone on my list.
Not just cool stuff — the right stuff. Books: these are the stories that keep us dreaming and hoping, that make us smarter and more effective. Music: these are ‘songs in the key of life,’ feeding the soul like nothing else. And movies: instant empathy for people we’d never otherwise know. Emerson was right: ‘The bust outlasts the throne.’ The gift of art is the gift that endures.
Then comes the charity part. Because the hurricane inspired many people to give to the Red Cross and other disaster agencies, charity giving in New York is running behind last year’s figures. At supermarket checkout donation boxes, The Food Bank for New York City has collected about 50% of what it got during this period last year. Donations to The Salvation Army are off $160,000. Citymeals-on-Wheels is running 15% behind last year.
"First feed the face, then talk right and wrong," Bertolt Brecht wrote. We’re with him. And so the money we don’t spend on expensive presents and the money we save by not baking cookies and sending Christmas cards will go mostly to hunger-relief causes. We’re partial to Share Our Strength and Second Harvest, but I suspect we’ll spread our giving around. On the international front, we’ll donate to Doctors Without Borders, which is working frantically to provide shelter for victims of the Pakistan earthquake.
And then, along with our small gifts, we’ll enclose a note to our loved ones, explaining what we’re doing — in their honor — around the country and around the world.
Let me emphasize: We’re not scaling down on presents and amping up our charity giving for any ‘holier than thou’ reason. We’re not trying to ‘set an example’. We don’t seek admiration. We’re celebrating the holidays this way because, this year, it’s the only way we can think of to get through them without feeling small and silly and sad.
So why am I going on like this? Because if you’re feeling as we do, I want you to know you’re not alone. Because if money’s tight and you need to think hard about every gift, it’s my hope you can find meaningful presents on these screens that will delight your loved ones longer and more deeply than something shiny and pricey. And because I just plain ‘had to.’
Your thoughts? Your holiday plans? Feel free to write me at HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com and share.
Back to regular programming tomorrow.
