Christmas is becoming so plastic
I was buying a Christmas present – a harmonica, if you must know – at a local store this week.
I went up to the counter, whipped out my wallet and handed the man a crisp twenty.
He recoiled in shock.
“Cash?” he said. “At Christmastime?”
He held that Andy Jackson between two fingers and paused a second to re-group. He then carefully counted out my change.
I understand his alarm. Like any American, I am reluctant to pay cash for anything at Christmastime. Just the other day, my wife and I were discussing whether to buy a particularly pricey hunk of electronics for Christmas.
“Can we afford to?” she asked.
I looked at her as if she were crazy.
“What does that have to do with it?” I asked, annoyed. “We have credit cards. Two of ‘em. And we can get more.”
As you can see, I am totally in tune with the American Christmas spirit. Christmas is a time of wonder, of magic, and of “magical thinking” when it comes to finances.
I, personally, believe in Santa. I believe in the miracle of Christmas. I also believe in these other holiday “miracles”:
•That if I charge something on my credit card now, I will have been declared the winner of at least a moderate, six-figure lottery prize by the time the January Visa bill arrives.
•That I will receive a long-awaited inheritance from a kindly eccentric whose only other heirs are her 30 cats.
•That I will receive an enormous raise on Jan. 1 that will not be obliterated by rising health insurance costs, rising gasoline costs and my $500 Avista bill.
•That when the bill arrives, Visa will have somehow “misplaced” all evidence of any iPod purchases.
•That when the bill arrives, the total will somehow be lower than I expected, due to a complicated mathematical formula involving the conversion from American dollars to the Canadian loonie to the Lithuanian plotzky.
•That, due to rampant 30 percent inflation, a 16 percent APR will suddenly look like a steal.
•That the postal carrier will deliver my bill to the wrong address, buying me a month of plausible deniability.
Yes, this is that magical time of the year when we simply don’t care how much money we don’t have.
It really is bizarre, when you think about it. People keep talking about the ancient roots of the Christmas celebration, going back to medieval times and even deep into the Roman Christian and pagan past. Yet here are my questions:
Did the Wise Men purchase myrrh on credit?
When knights gathered in the Great Hall for wassail, did they run a tab?
Did a serf sign a contract for 24 monthly payments when he bought his serf-ette a new Christmas ass? (That would be a donkey.)
In Dickens’ London, did middle-class families like the Cratchits get overextended on their credit and court financial ruin?
So my question boils down to: Have people always used Christmas as an excuse for being fiscally irresponsible? Or is it just us?
It would take a better financial historian than I to answer that question, although I do know that there was a quaint Christmas tradition in Dickens’ London known as “debtor’s prison.”
Anyway, I assure you that my use of $20 cash on the barrelhead last week was a fluke, an aberration, a Christmastime anomaly. I promise never to do it again, primarily because that $20 is long gone.
So it’s back to the magic of MasterCard for me. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, and darn it, we shouldn’t let the rumor of January spoil it for us. Somewhere, an eccentric stranger is shooing cats off her desk and writing our names in her will. …