No money for Christmas presents?

Markus from Green Bay

Every year you see articles about parents not having enough money for presents for their kids. But does this really have to be a bad thing?

My parents were ‘salt of the Earth’ working class people, born in 1933 and 1941 respectively, working hard from an early age on to build up Germany from the ruins and rubble it was after the Second World War. I was the first of four children, all born in a small village in the middle of nowhere in the 1960s, and my early Christmas memories are of the whole house being cleaned, everything being made to look festive, a big meal being cooked, kids all scrubbed and dressed up, a lot of stress and shouting, and then at 6 pm being lined up in front of the door and expected to beam happily for the camera my father had bought before my birth to document our family life - when in reality you didn’t feel particularly happy due to having been shouted at and the stress all day long. In reality it was a performance, a farce really.

As I got quite active in church and took religion seriously back then, I declared at the age of 12 and weeks in advance that I do NOT want presents: "After all, It isn’t MY birthday!”. Of course the usual scenario played out and I got presents - which I refused to open. Cue more shouting, upset mother, festivities ruined even more than usual.

But I stuck to my convictions, and after three such Christmases we reached a compromise. There was not going to be a big meal anymore but something simple so that mother wasn’t exhausted and rushed off her feet trying to fulfil some silly social obligations - after all, Jesus and his followers drank from wooden cups, not out of golden goblets, and if simple was good enough for them, it was good enough for us. And instead of presents we would donate the money to a good cause.

The difference this made was enormous. No more stressing about and running around for presents. No more spending money that was in short supply anyway. No longer thinking giving presents was the main point of Christmas. No fancy tableware or food, slaving in the kitchen for hours. No exhaustion. No shouting. No bad atmosphere.

And simple and easy doesn’t mean it isn’t tasty - a potato salad and sausages, or later smoked salmon (bought and stored in the freezer when it was on special) with lettuce and horseradish on toast was plenty festive enough, and quite honestly: we kids didn’t care about fancy food. We wanted plenty and tasty - and that we got in spades.

Now we simply relaxed at the table, eating and talking and enjoying ourselves while waiting for the next toast to pop up, and playing board games after dinner - playing with each other instead of with some new toy that we didn’t really need anyway. And at midnight walking through the dark and cold, with the snow crunching underneath our feed, going to mass …

These were by far the best Christmases I had with my family. It really FELT like Christmas.

Sadly when the next generation of kids came along, my siblings reverted to the old-fashioned way. Social pressure is immense, and with my niece and nephew being the only kids in our extended family for quite a while they got absolutely hammered with presents. Everyone seemed to compete with each other (I stayed out of it) and when my nephew was just 10 he got a mobile phone, a bike, a table tennis table with all the trimmings, and much more that I don’t remember anymore.

I always found it fitting that in English another word for presents is ‘gift’ - because in German ‘gift’ means poison.

And for me, these presents have always been a poison to the meaning of Christmas …