We Chose to Still Have Christmas Amid the Whirlwind of Unemployment and Foreclosure

Christmas memories come in so many different packages, and like Christmas presents, some of them are more pleasant than others. Christmas 2004 is one of those memories that doesn't quite fit a Hallmark card or Christmas Carol, and at the time did not seem so Holly Jolly wonderful for my husband and I. We were in a place where so many people find themselves this Christmas: facing the possibility of unemployment, foreclosure, and, unknown to us, family catastrophe. In the midst of that situation, we opted to still celebrate Christmas, and we are still glad that we did.

It was a few weeks before Christmas that year, my husband walked in the door from work looking pale and stricken. "Sit down," he said. Knowing this wasn't going anywhere good, I sat down. His job had been eliminated. The new corporation that had bought his company had done a lot of rearranging and changing, trying to save a dollar everywhere they could, quite often through the elimination of positions held by men in their early 50's.

The axe had fallen on my husband's position; it was being made part-time. Not only would he lose his regular overtime, but he would not be working but around 30 hours a week at a reduced wage, if he wanted to accept this newly-created position.

Insurance and benefits that we had long grown accustomed to for our family would be a thing of the past, unless we wanted to keep Cobra insurance, which, laughingly, cost more than the total he would make at this new, part-time position! I had always worked simultaneously at several part-time endeavors, none of which had any benefits.

We were already quite stretched financially, and we both knew things looked very bad for the coming year. What about Christmas? What should we do? Our children were in their teens, and they were old enough to understand the reality of the situation should we decide to just skip it all this year. No, my husband said, we would go on with Christmas as usual as though this bad news had not happened. Wow, I remember thinking that I didn't even know if I could put the Christmas tree up that year!

We did put it up, and we decorated the house. We bought and wrapped presents, and we prepared food for our regular "Put up the tree party" that we had each year. We entertained our elderly folks, just as we always had. Our kids had Christmas, and they had smiles, not quite realizing the depth of despair their father and I felt.

Did we make the right decision to go on with the expense of Christmas? You can decide that, and you need to balance the issues in your life to determine if the same decision is right for you. For us, it was the right decision. After Christmas, everything changed, never to be the same again.

Over the course of the next few months, we lost our beautiful Tudor home to foreclosure. It was traumatic, and it is still very painful for me to talk about. I will stress though that we have always had a place to live and food to eat, and for that I am very thankful. I am also glad that we made the choice to have Christmas that year; it was to be our last memories of the holidays in our family's home.

My mother was hit by a car the day after Christmas and almost died. Miraculously, she survived and eventually thrived, but the next several years were quite difficult as we saw her through numerous health issues. My husband's elderly parents are no longer with us, and my elderly step-grandmother was placed in a nursing home shortly after that. The Christmas festivities that we created were some of the very last that they enjoyed.

The little money that we spent on Christmas gifts, food, and fun that year would have had no impact on changing our financial situation. We could never have gone back and recaptured the moments we created that Christmas. I am glad that we opted to "have Christmas" in the middle of the whirlwind.