Don't blow it all on Christmas

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From left, Dominique Balcaen, Shannon Burns and Alison Carter plan to keep Christmas spending under control and they look forward to celebrating the joys of the season with family and friends. ( TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS )

In past years, Alison Carter and her husband, Dominique Balcaen, might have blown their budgets buying Christmas gifts for each other. These days, they're just thankful Santa Claus sticks to his $150 limit for their three-year-old daughter Eliana.

"We were DINKs (double income, no kids) at one point in our lives and it was a lot of fun, and we spent a lot of money," says Balcaen, a 32-year-old apprenticing electrician. "But things change, and it's more fun watching your kids open the gifts anyway."

Today, everything is purchased on debit, whereas previously, they would have bought gifts with their credit card and paid it off over the weeks -- or months -- to follow.

While it's no doubt good for their finances, it also makes the holiday season more enjoyable.

"Christmas doesn't stress us out at all," says Carter, 34, an event organizer for a charity. "I love it. It's eating, drinking, playing games, and friends and family."

Shannon Burns, 50, and her husband, Norm Chatel, 47, can also attest to lower stress levels this December.

The two school teachers also financed purchases on credit in the past and paid off their debt slowly.

"But this year, I think we will put things on the credit card for the points, but pay it off immediately because now I have a full-time job," says Burns, mother of two teenage boys, Liam and David-Louis.

Like many households, these families strike a balance between getting caught up in the spirit of the season and financial prudence. And it can be no easy task, considering the circumstances.

While it's commonly thought that our modern-day Christmas traditions are unduly influenced by advertising, which depicts consumption as the path to holiday joy, these urges have much deeper cultural, religious and economic roots than meet the eye, says a Christmas historian from the University of Manitoba.

Gerry Bowler says some Christians and even left-leaning, ecologically minded individuals often argue the holiday season is nothing more than an orgy of consumption in which the true meaning of Christmas gets lost.

But Bowler says over-indulgence has always been one of the dominant themes of Christmas celebrations for several hundred years, whether we realize it or not.

"Christmas has always been celebrated with excess," says the author of Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas.

"During the Middle Ages, people celebrated with an excess of food and drink. This is quite reasonable in an agricultural society where there isn't much money anyway."

And objections to Christmas celebrations date back just as far. In fact, in the 1600s, some societies went as far as banning any yuletide fun.

"Those Protestants that took over Switzerland, the Netherlands and parts of Scotland, and who for a short time had a revolution that governed England in the 1650s and '60s, were among the settlers to New England ," Bowler says. "And they abolished Christmas and everything to do with it -- greenery, minced pies and church services on Christmas."

In a 1993 article entitled Materialism and the making of the modern American Christmas, author Russell W. Belk wrote that Puritan communities imposed fines for anyone caught feasting, refusing to work or engaging in other forms of celebration during the season, calling the season a "wanton Bacchanalian feast."

To them, all that revelry had more in common with the Roman god of wine and excess, Bacchus, than it did with the birth of their saviour.

And they weren't entirely off the mark. Past and even present depictions of jolly old St. Nick or Santa Claus look remarkably like the Bacchus -- or Dionysus, as the Greeks called him -- depicted in artwork at the time.

Not that St. Nicholas was really nothing more than a reincarnation of Bacchus, as some wrongly surmise, Bowler says. Santa did spend his early years along the sunny Mediterranean, but not in Rome, before moving to the North Pole.

St. Nicholas was a bishop in southern Turkey, and like all saints, he had to earn beatification by performing a miracle, which in his case was raising the dead.

According to legend, he brought three students back to life, all murdered by an innkeeper, who had butchered them and preserved them in pickle barrels.

"That's why he's the patron saint of barrel-makers, picklers and students," Bowler says, adding a church in Ypres, France, actually has a wooden carving depicting St. Nicholas removing the students from the barrel.

But St. Nick is likely better known for his generosity. In one famous instance, he began the tradition of stuffing stockings with goodies. St. Nick threw three bags of gold into the home of a poor man with three daughters. The bags landed in shoes or stockings laid out by the fireplace, according to the St. Nicholas Center website, providing ample dowries for all three of the man's daughters so they could be married (and move out).

This generous spirit made him legendary, and over time he became known by many names: Father Christmas, Captain Christmas, Kris Kringle and, of course, his modern moniker Santa Claus, Bowler says.

Today, Santa is far removed from creating zombies, and his current incarnation, made famous by Coca-Cola in the '30s, '40s and '50s, has come to symbolize the kinder side of mass consumerism.

The soft-drink maker, however, cannot take credit alone for Santa, the pitchman.

"Coke actually had nothing to add to the modern image of Santa Claus," Bowler says. "He had been looking like that in magazine ads for soft drinks for years,"

Bowler also says some have theorized that Coca-Cola helped popularize Santa Claus looking an awful lot like Bacchus. (After all, what soda company wouldn't want a gluttonous, good-timer selling their product?) But artist Haddon Sundblom based Santa on his neighbour, Bowler says.

"And when that guy died, he used himself."

At that time, the commercial side of the season had started to hit its stride, slowly building since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which made more people prosperous and put consumable goods within the reach of most families' budgets.

"You've got a shifting emphasis from Christmas as a kind of community, outdoor, alcohol-fuelled event to an indoor, domestic, child-centred event," Bowler says.

"The emphasis shifts from an excess of food and drink to demonstrating solidarity and love by purchasing things."

And though some contend that is, in fact, worse, Bowler says those people have likely forgotten what it's like to be a child.

Most adults, however, haven't forgotten that starry-eyed feeling from their childhood, including Alison Carter and her family.

"The holidays are really just about the excitement for our daughter," she says. "It will be really exciting this year to watch her open the presents, because she just loves everything about the holidays now."

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St. Nicholas - the patron saint of just about everybody

Besides picklers, students and the poor, St. Nicholas's patronage encompasses people of almost every vocation and persuasion, says history professor Gerry Bowler.

Here's the list from Bowler's book, Santa Claus: A Biography:

Aberdonians, apothecaries, Austrians, bakers, barrel-makers, boatmen, Belgians, boot-blacks, brewers, brides, butchers, button-makers, captives, chandlers, children, coopers, dock workers, Dutchmen, druggists, firemen, fishermen, florists, folk falsely accused, fruitful marriages, Greeks, grooms, haberdashers, judges, Liverpudlians, longshoremen, maidens, merchants, murderers, newlyweds, notaries, old maids, orphans, parish clerks, paupers, pawnbrokers, perfumers, pharmacists, pilgrims, pirates, poets, rag pickers, Russians, sailors, sealers, shipwrights, Sicilians, spice dealers, students, thieves, travellers and weavers.

Santa protests... say it ain't so

In the '50s, the Catholic Church took up the fight against the commercialization of Christmas -- or "Santa Clausation," Bowler says. "Santa Claus, for example, was burnt at the stake outside of Dijon Cathedral in France in the 1950s. They objected to the shift from the manger to the chimney."

Christmas, the economic powerhouse

Most people are familiar with the term "Black Friday." If you're an investor, it likely means a horrible week's end on the stock market. If you're a shopaholic, it has a much more positive meaning - the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, and the official start of the Christmas season. Many U.S. retailers hold sales, not only to attract customers, but also because it marks a transition from the red (indebtedness) to black (profitability) for them. With the higher loonie relative the U.S. dollar, more Canadians have been taking part as well. According to a recent Visa survey, about a quarter of all Canadian online shoppers take advantage of Black Friday deals.

Overall, Canadians have been scaling back their holiday spending. StatsCan reported that Canadians spent about $26 billion in December last year, excluding automotive sales, about $1 billion less than in 2007.

This year, a RBC-sponsored survey found a similar trend of muted excess because of concerns about the economy.

"ö 47 per cent of Canadians said they are trimming their holiday spending this season. About 37 per cent of Manitobans and Saskatchewanians said they will spend less.

"ö The average Canadian expects to spend $1,218 on holiday purchases, including gifts, decorations and entertaining. People in Saskatchewan and Manitoba expect to spend $880.

"ö One in five Canadians won't buy anything at all for the holidays. That number drops to about one in 10 Manitobans.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 12, 2009 B14