Dec 18th, 2007
The Cost of Christmas
For some bizarre reason, my sister told my 7 year old niece that her favorite uncle (that would be me) would get her a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. Aside from the fact that the thing has been incredibly scarce, one of the questions that it raises is what cost do the holidays have for people?
The obvious cost is the financial cost; even for someone like me who tries to keep costs down, things add up. Today I spent $36 for the Aeropress coffee maker for SF (which was in addition to a few DVDs I already got for her) and $125 on four gift cards; I still have a few gift cards left to get. All of that is added to the $140 I already spent on gift cards (and SF’s DVDs, which I paid for in part with an Amazon gift certificate), and the still unpurchased non-Wii gift for my niece.
You can add to this the cost of time, the cost of paying too much, and the cost of stress. It took me 30 minutes to get to the store where SF’s coffee maker was; this was after a rough day at work where I left late. I could have easily been home by the time I got to the mall, but instead, I was looking for parking. Had I planned far enough ahead, I could have spent $10 less by ordering ahead from Amazon.com, but instead, I fought through a crowd that was building up to a Christmastime crescendo a week ahead of time. And if I had gone there early on a weekend, I would likely have avoided a lot of the drama involved with trying to get the perfect gift for someone with time running out.
There are other costs too. Like others, I notice I’m exercising less; I’m eating more, and what I do eat tends to be less healthy for me. I wonder about what other people think and worry about who might give me a present that I haven’t prepared for, concerned about the social awkwardness of the situation. And like many of my fellow bloggers, I’m also concerned that the true meaning of the holidays has been lost in a sea of retail raunchiness and commercialism.
What does Christmas cost you? Both in dollars, and in everything else? Is it still all worth it?
