A bit of measured miserliness can be a jolly good thing, argues Michael Gilmore, making Christmas enjoyable without breaking the bank for the rest of the year

Scrooge has been much-maligned, and deep down we all know it. Years before Coca-Cola popularised Santa Claus’s red clobber and big white beard, and even before Prince Albert’s spruce trees became ubiquitous across his wife’s United Kingdom, Charles Dickens ruined Christmas in 1843, and the British psychological relationship with money alongside it, with the publication of A Christmas Carol.

There’s no problem with Ebenezer’s backstory. A child left alone in a prison-like boarding school over Christmas, losing his sister in childbirth and then his only love to the one area he had gained control of in his life – numbers and the money they represented – this is a traumatised man trying hard to cover for it. Admittedly trying a little too hard, but nonetheless, he has reasons for his behaviour. As Brad Pitt says in my new favourite Christmas film Bullet Train, “hurt people hurt people,” and they don’t come much more hurt than Ebenezer.

Vicky Reynal, a self-declared financial psychotherapist, perhaps the first, who won a Money Awareness and Inclusion Award for her book Money on Your Mind, would have had a field day with Mr Scrooge. As she said on a recent podcast: “If your family has gone through a bankruptcy, that will shape your anxieties about your future finances or your ability to be better than your parents and not make the same mistakes.”

Ebenezer is a truly wonderful character study, so of course that’s not my problem with A Christmas Carol. The problem is that it finishes with the idea that retail really is therapy, and we all end up happier if we just blow all our money on a big party. It’s Victorian YOLO meets modern-day BNPL. It’s as though Charles Dickens had imagined all the Instagram influencers opening their shopping hauls in front of us, wearing the same clothes, the same make-up, the same ring light reflecting in their eyes, the identikit fetishisation of shallowness – and endorsed it all. We should all be convinced by the name on the bag, not whether we need what’s inside it – that’s how the end of A Christmas Carol feels.

It has always made me sad when people, nice people, say “I don’t want to save because I want to enjoy myself now,” because they don’t hear the 100% correlation that they are implying exists between happiness and spending money. This is what has led to an England of binge-drinking, splurge-spending conspicuous consumption. Last January, the Income and Expenditure Hub (iehub.co.uk) estimated that one in six households in the UK borrowed money to enjoy their Christmas, and on average were still paying that debt off in May. Some were still paying off last Christmas as the next one approached.

Scrooge didn’t simply push a button on his phone to purchase a prize turkey in four easy  interest-free (allegedly) payments. He’d already saved the money by being, well, a scrooge his whole life. Most people haven’t been saving, and will either be dipping into much-needed savings or adding to their debts – every year taking a step backwards, whether they had taken one forwards earlier that year or not.

While it might be a bit much to blame Christmas for causing the Cratchits’ poverty, and not Scrooge, it isn’t too much to blame the global marketing industry for our lack of satisfaction with what we currently have, and wanting us to spend more. Because that’s what its function is, literally. Whether it’s the retailers’ competition to have the schmaltziest TV commercial, the glitziest window displays, or to fill their shelves with crackers and mince-pies the day they clear out the Halloween crap, we’re urged to spend and spend and spend as the year reaches its end.

And while that’s not Charles Dickens’s direct fault, he gave these low-life shysters and shills access to the moral high-ground through A Christmas Carol, which they never fail to take if it will help them.

I’m pretty certain that if he saw the festival of hawking wares that Christmas has now become, and not a celebration of what really matters, of taking care of each other, of enjoying things that don’t cost that much, of spending within a budget that doesn’t blow out the rest of the year, of giving yourself and others the real gift of time with each other, he’d give his old story a resolute “Bah, humbug!”, which is essentially the Victorian way of saying,  “Cut the crap!”

Three Best Budget Christmas Ideas

• My previous favourite Christmas film, A Muppet Christmas Carol, is usually free on YouTube. Michael Caine is perhaps the only actor who never dials it in: his Scrooge is an Oscar-level performance, to puppets. A true festive wonder.
• Tell people what you really want in advance. It doesn’t have to be something big, just something you thought of. Ask them to return the favour. Save the waste.
• Work out what it is that everyone you are spending Christmas with really likes about it, and then make time for that. Ask them, don’t guess. It will be watching telly together, watching Grandad fall asleep. It will be chocolate and satsumas for breakfast. It will be the after-lunch walk wearing your new socks and scarf. It won’t be the expense. It won’t be being skint until summer.

This article is from Idler #106.

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