Christmas Confirms That America Has A Savings Problem

The obvious thought that comes when you read a headline regarding a savings problem is that we don't put enough money in our bank accounts, yet this might be more problematic than that.

As we grow up in America, we understand the goal. Get paid, live a happy life, buy lots of toys each year at Christmas time and hope to have some money left over to do it again next year.  This year, retail sales over Christmas are down 3% from last year when we apparently had less.   I would hope this means American's have decided to save their money for the uncertain future, but we all know better.

Retailers will get that money.  They may lose profit, but they know for certain that American's will respond to deep discounts.  Eventually, we will take our piggy banks and justify smashing them open for deals that were "just too good to pass up".  Next year we will do the same song and dance between ourselves and retailers.  The goal is to step on each others toe in this dance and the winner is the one with the toes that are the least sore.

Christians across the country are fighting like mad just to preserve the real meaning of Christmas because Christ is being subverted for Santa in the role of the monogram of Christmas.  While this is the right fight,  the place we wage this fight is upon the symbols that garnish our government buildings at this time of the year.  Most retailers have already acquiesced to the "Happy Holidays" hysteria figuring it is not a fight worth losing business over.

The blood of the Passover is battling a bunny in a similar fashion.  However, it isn't as though the Easter bunny or Santa just started last year.  These instruments of celebration have always needed the perspective that our families gave.  The problem is that families are having a hard time giving in to capitalistic Christmas or the ego Easter (with all the fancy clothes) and still telling our children that God is the reason for the season. Mine too.

Just the intrigue of wondering how deep discounts will go is enough to get most of us to buy something.  But at what cost?  These days, the only time we are saving something is when we are saving those memories of our childhood.  When the Christmas that had more lights and more toys would be outdone by the next Christmas that had even more lights and even more toys.  We are saving childhood memories that sometimes don't coincide with real life economies, and our children grow up to do the same for their children and so on.  We become adults guilty that we can not give our kids all of the things that our parents really couldn't give us either but did because they had similar guilt.

We surely are saving something, but it ain't money.