The holiday season was designed to bring joy and excitement to the masses after a busy year of trial and tribulations. While for many people it does just that, there is still many others who end up creating debt problems related to the holidays. These debt problems not only put a damper on the season to be jolly, but they also make the subsequent months and years more difficult to handle financially.
The Holiday Spirit
For better or worse, the holiday spirit drives people to what could be considered excessive generosity. People love to give gifts and host parties during the holidays as a means of bringing family and friends together to perhaps make up for lost time during the year. The stores are all dressed up in its holidays best, the holiday music is playing, and a festive atmosphere seems to permeate everything going on in the country. It's really hard to blame anyone
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However, it doesn't stop most people from trying. The most common way people deal with any monetary restriction is to pull out the plastic and let the credit card companies temporarily foot the bill. In the short term, it feels good to be generous and show caring to others. It feels good all the way up to the point the credit card bills start coming in the door. It's then that the "holiday spending hangover" sets in and people start to see and feel the error of their ways.
Dealing With the Holiday Hangover
When you drink too much alcohol, you wake up the next day with a hangover. There isn't much you can do about it except drink some water, take a couple of pain killers and work you way through it. A holiday spending hangover is much the same thing. You feel bad, but there isn't much left to do except start figuring out how to pay the associated bills. Depending on how far overboard you go, there will be some amount of financial pain for you to endure.
Avoiding the Holiday Spending
Having uniforms or no uniforms is a controversial topic amongst schools. However, the idea of Spirit Wear is both comfortable but also looks professional with uniform bottoms, serving as a compromise. Spirit Wear also shows a student’s style and provides more options to clothing. Finally, it would receive positive feedback from students as it did when it was first allowed every Friday. Spirit Wear should be optional everyday because uniforms are uncomfortable, spirit wear allows more options to show personality, and are already allowed on Fridays.
From the first day of December you can notice the Christmas spirit in everyone's face. In my grandma's house me and my older brother had to go to a near forest to cut a pine tree and afterwards we had to check every single light to make sure to only put the ones that work. The most marvelous feelings is walking inside your house and smelling all the food being cooked and the smell of a fresh cut pine tree.Furthermore everyone house is full of food and consequently there are children running around the streets having a blast. In the other hand christmas in the united states is very depressing for someone like me, because do do all the abundance and ways to get whatever you desire there is no longer a sensation or the impulsive to share with your neighborhoods the joy of that marvelous moment. This is a perfect example of how difference in income can have a totally different effect on entire community. Where i lived the feeling of a community coming together and putting aside their differences is like a forest full of green trees filled with live. However if you celebrate this day in a different places with none of your family instead of that joy it's depressing and there is no longer the two months of desperately waiting for the that day to
The exchange of gifts between family members and friends is the commercial aspect of the holiday which has been embraced by shop-owners of large and small businesses. Spending money
Ah Christmas, it is said to be the most wonderful time of the year. In the United States Christmas is a time of giving and receiving, spending time with your family, and in most Christian families, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Christmas is hands-down the most highly commercialized holiday celebrated by Americans. In fact, according to CBS news, the average American will spend $700 on gifts this holiday season, totaling for a whopping $465 billion spent nation-wide. From mall Santas as far as the eye can see, to hearing Christmas music in every retail store you enter. Christmas is a time of high spirits and high spending in the U.S.
A Review of Penne Restad’s Christmas in America: A History Penne Restad’s Christmas in America is a demonstration of the change in American acceptance of Christmas and the understanding of what the holiday is. The book shows that the evolution from the humble European origins coming together in the United States through the 18th and 19th centuries cumulating in an amalgamation of different traditions to create a more unified American holiday. Events that propelled the solidification of the holiday are specific to the geographic separation creating pockets of cultural tradition to emerge without relative interference. The bedrock of Christmas history in America paved the way to ritualistic materialism in the 1800s that continues today, accessible
Why waste money on things that are unnecessary? Finally, the holiday saves money for humans. It keeps the little they have in their
There is no doubt that Christmas is a religious event but nowadays Christmas becomes more commercialized, as it has been defined as a high consumption season because the gifts giving culture becomes the most important part of Christmas and the consumers want to please their children
According to the American Heritage College Dictionary the word Christmas is defined as “the annual festival of the Christian church commemorating the birth of Jesus: celebrated on December 25 and now generally observed as a legal holiday and an occasion for exchanging gifts.” When one thinks of Christmas they may think of Santa, elves, Jesus, and Christmas music. One such as Scrooge, who hates Christmas and is greedy. However one English author reminds readers Christmas can be found in the most dark people. Charles dickens’s A Christmas Carol helps readers identify the negative effects of greed.
In Money Can't Buy Love: Asymmetric Beliefs about Gift Price and Feelings of Appreciation by Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams, they talk deeply about the amount of gifts that people buy. For instance millions of Americans are always buying items and gifts every single day. It is especially this way during the month of December when shoppers “spent over $30 billion at retail stores”(Flynn and Adams 5). The massive amount of shopping for gifts for people who may not even like them is considered a bad habit to economists. People buy things for people who wouldn’t normally buy those things to begin with. It represents a waste in resources and is “referred to as ‘the deadweight loss of Christmas’” which is because people tend to overspend on gifts
Christmas time. Christmas time brings wonder and hope to children. The main component to this wonder and hope is for a mythical being called Santa Claus. This Santa Claus comes in the night and brings “good little children” toys. In reality the parents do. With this combination and the thought we have to give this, this, and this person something different, sentimental, and special gifts the sales were definitely a game changer to people. We could get gifts way cheaper and early. Once stores relied “hey we can take advantage of this movement” the sales have taken over our lives made the even inhuman. In the article “Black Friday: Consumerism minus Civilization he mentions this exact theory. The holiday has become a lot earlier, the shopping
We all know what Christmas is. At least I hope so. You may not celebrate it, but you know what it is. Some have Hanukkah and others have Kwanzaa. Hanukkah is for the Jews who celebrate the victory of the Maccabees over the larger Syrian army. While with Kwanzaa, people light a kinara and give gifts to each other. This takes place over seven days. Isn't that nice? Seven days of celebration! Christmas however… Is a single day. With Christmas, the children believe in a big, old, jolly man in a red suit called “Santa Clause”. On Christmas night he comes down your chimney, leaves presents and take the milk and cookies. For one thing, that's breaking and entering and for a second thing, he leaves unknown gifts?! You don't know whats in there! It
Christmas is an international holiday that is beloved by many. I, however, see Christmas for what it really is. It isn’t some festive love fest that celebrates the birth of Jesus; Christmas is an allusion. Christmas has pulled the wool over the eyes of many by presenting the temptation of gifts, therefore making them oblivious to the true meaning behind the holiday. Christmas has betrayed its lineage, it has lost sight of its purpose, and it is denouncing the powerful meanings and messages for future generations to come. This holiday has been around for centuries and over the years it has become a façade and has found a way to hide what it truly stands for.
It’s Christmas season again, so I guess technically crazy sales, heavy traffic probably you can only go like five miles per hour on the highway, and also the Christmas bonus which are parents are excited about. Christmas parties which all of us are really looking forward. Finding that perfect gift for the little ones because their expectations are also high for Santa who believed that comes down from the chimney. Don’t even get me started on how much food will be consumed during this time. Its finally the time of year where people are merry. Can’t you just feel that cold breeze? It’s the time of year where kids are running around checking what’s underneath that Christmas tree with excitement in their faces and ripping the presents as happy
Each year I see exactlly the same action happening. The idea of Christmas appears earlier and earlier. Last Christmas I saw stores actually putting up Christmas objects up right after Halloween. What happened to Thanksgiving? Stores know they can do this and get away with the action because that is how people are right now. After a certain time, some people go into a Christmas mode. Got to get this item, got to buy these presents, got to set up Christmas decorations and tree. For people Christmas comes earlier and earlier. Stores take a hold of this and destroy the action. They will make sales for certain items, even when black Friday is not yet up yet. Sales on Christmas trees and sales on ornaments. I remember when these sales were directly
Holidays have always been known to affect our consumer culture for many years, but how it all began eludes many people and very few studies have been completed on it. Even though some say that the subject is too broad to precisely identify how holidays, especially Christmas, directly affect our market, I have found that people’s values, expectations and rituals related to holidays can cause an excessive amount of spending among our society. Most people are unaware that over the centuries holidays have become such a profitable time of year for industries that they now starting to promote gift ideas on an average of a month and a half ahead of actual holiday dates to meet consumer demands.