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Globe Santa: When children hear holiday presents aren’t for them
‘Tis the unequal holiday season.
When parents or guardians write to Globe Santa requesting holiday gifts for their children, it’s not necessarily about getting them stuff. About acquisition. It’s about finding a way for their kids to feel normal, special, and appreciated, like other kids they know.
“All I want is for my child to not be left behind or feel left out,” writes a mother who’s been a student at a community college for the past year. She has a son who’s a toddler, and she is doing an unpaid internship as part of her program, “working towards our future.” Every last cent goes to paying bills and getting out of debt.
“I have endless love for him and show him that. But every child wants to open a gift on Christmas and I hate to be the reason he does not get to participate. I’d hate for him to watch others open gifts and he not have one. I’d be heartbroken.”
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Celebrating while poor can be a miserable and futile exercise. The post-Thanksgiving period is when mass consumerism is at its most frenzied, and there’s a reason it’s been called the Unequal Holiday Season. It’s the time when the gap between low-income families and those more affluent is more acute than ever.
“The impact on children’s self-esteem is often tied to the gifts they receive,” according to Saffron Trust Women’s Foundation, a Texas-based nonprofit that works to break the cycle of generational poverty. “Parents are faced with the difficult choice of allowing their children to feel unworthy, or explaining the financial constraints that prevent them from fulfilling their child’s desires.”
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Or going hungry for a few days, as some parents tell Globe Santa.
Many children already know the sting of feeling unequal. A mother of two who’s “suffering from a very tight financial life” explains that she was laid off by her company at the beginning of the year, and recently had to renege on something that mattered a lot to her kids. “I decided to cancel the order of my kids’ school pictures to save some money to do grocery shopping.”
But what she saved is still not enough to buy something to put under the Christmas tree, she writes. Her son and daughter, both avid readers, are hoping for new books. “They love reading, and I keep saying ‘no’ when they ask me to order books online or at the book fair.”
Another mother, a single parent, is in dental school and writes that she’s unable to work “due to school and the long commutes. I live off loans from school and it is very hard to buy things that are not necessities for my daughter.”
At which point her 6-year-old daughter appropriated the sheet of paper her mom was using and drew a picture that shows clearly what’s on her mind. It shows a little girl with wide eyes and a big smile, standing next to presents under a Christmas tree.
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“My heart breaks when I think of her at school and someone asks what she got for Christmas and she feels embarrassed to saying nothing,” the mother signs off. “I think about this a lot.”
For 69 years Globe Santa, a program of the Boston Globe Foundation, has provided gifts to children in need at holiday time. Please consider giving by phone, mail, or online at globesanta.org.
Linda Matchan can be reached at [email protected]
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