Now I feel much better...
Christmas is a time of giving. We all know this; it has been one of the axioms of Christmas for as long as I can remember (it feels like a bloody long time too, particularly on Mondays). Last week, a local newspaper published an article on how much the average Australian would be spending on presents at Christmas (see the link at the bottom of this article). I was shocked and concerned. I was shocked because the figure is way higher than I expected and I was concerned because releasing this figure prior to Christmas can place an unreasonable level of stress on some people at an already stressful time of the year.
The sum: $857. Think about it… $857 is quite a bit of money. I have never spent that much at Christmas. It’s not because I’m a scrooge but because I was raised to believe it is not the gift but the giving that is important.
Let me break it down this way for you: hypothetically, $857 could buy my wife and I a wonderful week-long break at one of the beautiful little coastal towns north of Sydney, including accommodation, food, travel and spending money. Sure, we wouldn’t be staying anywhere particularly fancy. But we would be staying right on a beach, eating well and enjoying every second of the break. It could buy us a return trip to Auckland, New Zealand. It could pay our registration and insurance for the car. It could also buy a fresh water supply, family health care cover, primary schooling for a child, a small business loan, a community school and a toilet for a poor community in the third world.
But really, my concern is not over the amount of money but rather the undue stress it causes some people. For an increasing amount of people living below the poverty line here in Australia, just seeing this figure on the front page of a newspaper would have been a crushing blow. I must admit to feeling a little inadequate myself because there is no way I could afford to spend that much on presents. Of course, when I spoke to my wife about it, she brushed it off and told me not to worry myself with it. But I couldn’t brush it off that easily. I kept thinking about how this time brings more suicides, more depression and anxieties and more domestic violence than any other time of the year. Then I thought about how irresponsible and downright nasty of the newspaper to publish such a piece before Christmas. I wrote a letter outlining why I thought the newspaper was a bit like the Grinch, by putting a hurting on Christmas for a lot of people.
But then I realised the media hasn’t done anything different to how they’ve behaved during the rest of the year and maybe I was the one who had unreasonable expectations of them. It certainly didn’t make me feel any better about not having enough to even rate as an ‘average’ Australian, but at least they didn’t shock me by behaving out of character. That would have been too much for me to take.
Link to story:
Link