Because It’s December
As the calendar year comes to an end, Americans are inclined to think more than usual about money. Depending on one’s circumstances, thinking about money takes many forms. One of them, that includes so many of us, is Christmas spending, which imposes a different form of stress in every part of the social fabric. It’s either stress over finding the perfect presents that will wow the recipients or wondering if you can afford anything, and degrees of each stressor. There are people who haven’t received or given a present in years. They’re relieved of the stress of shopping, but they might be blue, left out of the seasonal generosity. Giving has a broad variety of emotional elements—the pleasure in offering a token of love, worry because there’s no money to do it, excitement about the happiness a gift will bring someone, sadness because the person you’d love to give to is gone, et cetera— and more so when the economy is tanking.
Gifting in December is entrenched in American culture for another reason, the end of the tax year and the time to contemplate tax benefits of giving. Our emails are deluged with begging from nonprofits telling you they can’t carry on without your donation. Charitable giving evolved it’s own holiday, Giving Tuesday, so people could give generously to good causes instead of paying more taxes. It should be called Deduction Day. We’re reminded daily that it’s coming and we must be ready to give generously to save nonprofits struggling to do good.
This also adds stress to December. You might worry about putting your generosity to its best use or maximizing your deductibles. If you’re one of those people who became unemployed recently, you might feel awful when prodded by last year’s beneficiaries to give as generously this year, while forced to watch your spending, regardless of the tax benefits. Assuming you will find another job before too long, and unwilling to seem less generous, you might solve the momentary cash deficit with credit cards, and the interest makes your generosity more stressful as the weeks on unemployment add up.
Obviously, the best stress relief comes from enormous bank balances, where thousands of dollars of spending—or even millions— aren’t worth notice. Things might become stressful for people at that level of wealth when billions are at risk. But as psychological research confirms, billions of dollars do not make happiness, and maintaining those bank balances surely has it’s own form of stress, but no doubt better than catering holiday parties, 19 hours a day on your feet, or pissing in a jar to make your shift quota of Amazon Christmas present deliveries.
And then there are things that are year-round stressors, felt more when the world is supposed to be jolly: bereavement, abandonment, eviction, ill health, depression, politics, and so on. A stress-free life is a marvel, and a simply joyous December is not as common as advertisers would have us believe.
Among the most stressed people in December, besides the vendors who stay in business, or don’t, because of December sales, are the nonprofit staffs forced to beg for cash, to take advantage of seasonal giving. Their jobs may well depend on it, and when the economy is faltering, the prognosis for acquiring bundles of money are slim. This is both stressful and depressing.
As the director of a nonprofit, who should be soliciting donations in December, I’m personally stressed by the need to do this. I dislike being one of the urgent campaigns preying on—and praying for— seasonal generosity, while making the financially struggling who would love to support what we’re doing feel bad because they can’t. As a former therapist, I’m disinclined to do anything that I know will make struggling people feel bad, especially when they’re our allies, and our progress has been slow because of it. If there were any grants in America for making sure artists could survive in cities like San Francisco, we’d be solvent, since I’m a decent grant writer.
But since it’s my job to keep ArtHouse moving forward, which we finally are, I should at least tell you why we’re here and how we serve the common good. Our mission is to keep, or return, artists in our cities, beginning with San Francisco, where a new form of art was born almost every decade of the 20th century. The last new art movement was Burning Man, which is now 35 years old, and the city no longer has the vibrant creative energy that made it so charming. You can’t see creative energy, but you can feel it. It’s why every neighborhood where artists lived and worked became gentrified; people love being in places where artistic innovation flourishes, and extensive research has proven that being in places where artists live and work improves mental health. So our work to bring artists back is a gift to everyone’s psychological well-being. You can read more about this on our website, https://arthousesf.org, where we explain what we’ve lost and who benefits from returning artists to a place that inspired their work.
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If you can help, and would like to, please click this to the ArtHouse donation page, and please Donate. If you can’t, we love you anyway, and would be happy to make your life culturally richer, happier, and more stimulating. We wish you all a December full of joy and a minimum of stress.
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“I suddenly had a feeling and presentiment that
New Years Day was not the first day of a new world…”
—Within a Budding Grove
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Proust Said That © 