For the 15th consecutive year, the SCROOGE Society is hoping you will dramatically curtail your Christmas gift-giving -- or at least your holiday spending -- and give more thought to the meaning of the season. Stop wasting mega-sums on stuff
nobody wants, says SCROOGE, and focus on the spirit of giving.
"Remember," says the society's 1994 newsletter, "that a merry Christmas isn't for sale in any store for any amount of money."
The Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges -- SCROOGE -- was founded in 1979 and is still run single-handedly by Chuck Langham, a retired writer of Army technical manuals.
SCROOGE is based in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Langham would like to restore the simplicity and intimacy of Christmases past. He remembers holidays from the 1950s and earlier when mom, dad, grandparents and the kids gathered around the tree to exchange relatively inexpensive gifts that were meaningful because they were personalized and few.
Today, he says, we've succumbed to the MCS syndrome -- mindless, compulsive scurrying. We rush about all year, to work, to self-improvement classes, to the gym, to committee meetings or whatever, and Christmas becomes just another occasion to ** scurry.
"It's all just one more complicated project to be accomplished, like an assignment at work," he says.
SCROOGE would have Americans stop giving and receiving elaborate, expensive gifts, especially the heavily advertised status-symbol items. These would presumably include Rolex watches, designer golf clubs and Jaguar cars, not to mention thousands of items in ritzy mail-order catalogs.
Mr. Langham also wants us to limit our Christmas spending to 1 percent of our family incomes. For a couple earning $40,000, that would be $400.
Stop using credit cards to pay for gifts, says Mr. Langham. Pay cash, save money and stay within your budget.
"I've heard all sorts of people say: 'Here it is August, and I'm still paying off bills from last Christmas.' Charge cards make that possible because you don't have to pay them all off at once."
To restore intimacy to Christmas, Mr. Langham's wife, Adella, makes her own ceramic tree ornaments to give to her friends.
Mr. Langham also brandishes his so-called "18-month law." This law states that much of the stuff we get and give at Christmas will turn up, 18 months later, at yard sales.
Like the exercise bike you gave your brother-in-law in 1991, without bothering to learn that he has a genetic aversion to all forms of exercise. You can buy exercise bikes at yard sales every June, says Mr. Langham, "and most of them have about 25 miles on them."
Or electric shavers. Those won SCROOGE's 1994 Don't-Want-It-For-Christmas Award as the least-desired of all gifts. Shaving, Mr. Langham believes, is a highly personal matter; people should be able to select their own tools for the task.
"And take these really horrible neckties," he says. "I've heard of people getting ties with, like, golden aardvarks on them. Nobody's going to wear something like that, except an aardvark breeder at the zoo."
SCROOGE is a small society: only 1,800 members in this country, Canada and abroad. But it's growing.
And every January, when Christmas bills hit the mailboxes, Mr. Langham gets a bunch of new members, all of them swearing that never again will they be trapped in the yuletide spending spree.