Plastic Christmas and poor children

EACH year people in Britain spend more and more money at Christmas time This year will see yet another record with gross purchasing far exceeding anything yet experienced.
This could be a good and healthy sign, pointing to the fact that the population, in general, is more prosperous than ever before. In fact, however, this is not the case.
More of the expenditure than ever before is in the form of credit. A "plastic Christmas" has been one inevitable headline describing the reckless splurge that will—not just could, but will bring ruin to some families. For the moneylenders, in whatever form they take and however seductive and simple-sounding their formulae for quick money and "easy terms", have never been more active and never more successful.
Credit cards are being used with an abandon never previously experienced. Many families will only be able to meet the cost of Christmas by going into further debt. The easy availability of credit was the forerunner of the last great crash in the western economy.
It is not suggested that we are once more on the eve of such a disaster. But it is being suggested that Christmas could be a much happier time for thousands more people if so much stress were not laid on expensive trappings, toys, gifts and parties. This atmosphere, stoked up for all its worth in the media and the barrage of glossy and sometimes grotesque advertisements, reaches, at a certain point, sickening proportions.
Indeed this is one of the more notorious aspects of that "consumerism" which the present Pope has criticised as strongly as he has condemned the different but not necessarily more dangerous kind of materialism which exists in the East. People in the West, in other words, are being exploited by manufacturers, advertisers and public relations experts in the way that makes a fool of them and is, in many cases, if rationally analysed, an insult to their intelligences. Inevitably, however, children who see mouth-watering toys being advertised on television or elsewhere, or on show in shop windows, beg their parents to be given them. The parents often feel they must accede even though they can in no way afford the corresponding outlay.
Side by side with this danger to the ultimate solvency of many stand the facts so starkly described in our front page report of some of the findings of the Child Poverty Action Group. This Group was founded in 1965. Since that year the number of children in Britain on or below the supplementary benefit poverty line has trebled. The actual proportion of children so affected is a staggering one in five. This, then, will not be a happy Christmas for many hundreds of thousands of children. A vicar was recently upbraided for telling school children that there was no Father Christmas. This got more headlines than would have appeared had he said, and it is a pity he didn't, that there was virtually no Christmas, because there was no money to spare, for thousands of children and, for that matter, adults as well.
He would have been laughed at if he said that loving kindness is a more precious gift than an expensive toy. But one would have appreciated his point in view of the dismal statistics regarding poor families in the midst of the biggest shopping splurge ever recorded in our country.
Very little can be done just at Christmas for those very poor children whose parents will be in the humiliating position of giving them inferior presents or no presents at all on Christmas Day. The only remedy for this situation is a long term one which depends on government policy. But it would be possible, by an extension of the activity of the Child Poverty Action Group, to provide at least some of the nation's deprived children with a happier Christmas in terms of at least the minimum participation in the kind of material pleasure which is far from wrong and which the vast majority take for granted.
Were each affluent family to donate a tenth of what they spend on presents to a centrally administered fund, such a fund could be used the following Christmas for community parties for next Christmas given in, say town halls. This would serve the double objective of reclaiming Christmas as a feast for all the local community and of not singling out poor children or poor families who are humiliated by having to go to charitable institutions, second hand shops, or even the pawnbroker, before some rather pathetic toy can be found to give their child.
It is all too often forgotten how extremely generous the majority of people are at Christmas. It is a tragedy that such generosity is not more enterprisingly but less commercially, tapped for the general good and for more universal good cheer.
Last year for instance parishioners at a parish in the Arundel and Brighton Diocese were asked to donate to charity the same amount as they spent on husbands or wives. It was not a vast parish but the amount collected was 125,000.
This shows not only how much "spare" money exists in generous circles, but how much could be channeled to those who need it most not for material purposes but for the sake of maintaining dignity in the face of poverty's cruel embrace.
In a spirit of sharing rather than remaining aloof, may we wish lour ever-increasing number of readers the happiest possible Christmas.