An Oldfashioned Christmas

Dennis has long called me “Squirrelly Shirley,” not because he thinks I’m a bit nutty (which I might be), but because I tend to squirrel things such as money away. This may have started in the early days of our marriage when I always added extra dollars to our mortgage payment in order to reduce the principal more quickly. Those extra dollars – sometimes ten, sometimes one hundred, or any amount inbetween – enabled us to pay off the thirty-year mortgage in fewer than 20 years.

Maybe being born during the Great Depression molded my frugal nature. Maybe it came from watching my grandmother carefully re-sewing my falling-apart storybooks. Maybe it came from watching my mother canning quarts of produce from our garden so that we would have vegetables to eat during the winter months. It could just be that a thrifty gene runs in my family.

One thing is certain: observing the things my mother and grandmother did gave me the knowledge I needed to get started in life. Over the years I’ve added to their repertoire, always striving to be as self-sufficient as possible and to save for the proverbial rainy day.

Now, in my old age, I’ve finally given up darning the holes in worn-out socks and turning shirt collars when they become frayed, but most of my thrifty ways remain intact. I’m not alone. Searching the Internet for “thrifty” and “frugal” yields connections to many news articles and blogs, usually written by people much younger than I. 

One of the younger ones is my daughter Carol, who must have inherited the thrifty gene. Shecan stretch a dollar farther than anyone else I know. She manages this while buying only organic ingredients for her family’s meals, sending her children to good preschools, and flying home to visit us twice each year.

This year Carol has decreed an oldfashioned Christmas for her family in Maine, which includes ten-year-old Pippi and four-year-old Zander. Pippi was none too happy about that until Carol told her their Christmas would be like the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie, books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder beginning in 1932. Pippi loves those books and is now excited about having an Ingalls Christmas.

Squirrelly Shirley is happy to go along with that kind of Christmas so I’m making Pippi a flannel nightgown and for Zander, who loves to dress in superhero costumes, a Spiderman mask. I saw one at Target today. It was made of plastic, which Carol abhors, so there was no question of my buying it. All I have to do is find the right size gourd in my basement stash and figure out how to turn it into a one-of-a-kind Spiderman mask. This is going to be fun, I hope. When it’s finished, I’ll post a photo. Wish me luck.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer