Holiday Season

I tend to remember years ago if someone even so much as mentioned Christmas before Thanksgiving, (the 4th Thursday in November) people would give you all kinds of lectures on commercialism. They would tell you that the Christmas season and holiday shopping does not start till the day after Thanksgiving.This year Halloween was not even over and Christmas decorations and gift boxed items were already going up in stores. Funny thing is that no one is complaining about it or even seeming to notice.

I went shopping this week. Mind you, it is still a week before Thanksgiving, not only were all the stores full of various Holiday season decorations, but there was Christmas music playing in many of the stores. Even more unusual was that the store employees seemed to be enjoying it.

What happened to the cries of commercialism and lectures on when the holiday season is supposed to begin?. Could it be that people are in the Holiday spirit already? Could it be they are just taking advantage of being able to shop early to beat the rush, or do people just not care any more? It’s not as though they can do anything about it anyway.With the cost of holiday gift giving these days you have to start months before the holiday not to feel the horrible pinch of the Santa money belt.

Many stores have done away with the layaway so waiting and getting everything right before the holiday when everything is on sale is out of the equation.. So paying full price for having to shop early is going to also cost the seasonal consumer more. Do the stores think the buying public won’t notice?

Probably the majority will notice their money is not going as far but will not fully realize that it is due to the creative thinking of the department stores executives raising their bottom lines.

I have to wonder if there is ever going to be a point where people say enough is enough. Some times I think the everyday people have just given up; perhaps feeling there is nothing we can do but just suck it up and go with the flow..

Companies downsize. cut bonus’. find ways to keep their employees from making more money while the cost of living keeps getting higher. People have to work more hours and harder to fill in the spaces of the smaller labor forces and paycuts. The outrageous fuel prices cause a trickle down effect touching every part of our lives. And now the holiday season starts in mid October instead of the end of November.

It just keeps getting worse every year.. People are too tired to fight back.. Too tired to complain or organize ways to get around the system.. It seems instead, that people are embracing the fact that they can start their holiday shopping early so they don’t have to do all that last minute crash shopping. They are willing to pay the non-sale prices just to get an early start..

I guess I have to admit, when I went shopping with my husband earlier this week I was doing some early Christmas shopping myself. I got a couple things that were hard to find items.. I enjoyed looking at the decorations and sang along with the occasional holiday song..I didn’t complain aloud about the early holiday setups.On the way home I just enjoyed the colorful leaves on the trees that the late autumn has left behind.. I thought myself quite clever to be ahead of the holiday shopping game..

Now, I am shaking my head with a little grin, knowing I fell right into the store’s game plan and paid more and earlier; just helping their before holiday season bottom line..Oh Well…. Fa La Lala la.. lala la la

Pennies on the Dollar

I know sometimes I watch too much TV.  Or should I say listen to too much TV.. I seldom just sit and watch it.. There are just to many things to get done to actually sit and watch it.. Well anyway….

I was listening and turning down the volume of the usual blast of loud commercials when I heard one that really bothered me.. “Do you owe over $10.000 to the government in tax debt.. If you do we could settle your tax debt for just pennies on the dollar…”

What.. pennies on the dollar? and they made enough money to have to pay $10,000 dollars in taxes.. And now I hear they won’t even have to pay most of them.. Why the heck not?  I have to pay mine. Everyone I know struggling or not has to pay theirs.  How come some fancy TV advertising lawyer can get some rich person standing in front of a near million dollar home out of paying most of their taxes.. “And we didn’t even have to lose our home”  Well, Yea Rah! for them. I’d be standing there smiling like a cheshire cat too if I just got the tax people to say “okay, hey don’t worry about it..

Every year the little guy like me pays my couple thousand to Uncle Sam.  Struggling to pay them religiously out of our paychecks.  Heaven forbid I am even late in paying the couple hundred that they didn’t get from my pay. For a  $70 mistake my tax prepared did on my taxes one year, they put a lien on my house with threat of selling it at public auction within months of the error. Seventy dollars and they were going to garnish our wages and sell our house and not let us tag our cars.. And these people who owe tens of thousands of dollars are not going to have to pay most of theirs..  What is wrong with this picture?

What makes them so special?  Why do my taxes that I have t pay go up every year and they are giving tax relief forgivemess to enough people that they have a commercial to target them?  Is that fair?

I still think of that little mistake my tax preparer made everytime I see that commercial and it makes me mad all over again. Of course I had a smile on my face when I found out it was a computer glitch that didn’t calculate the taxes correctly for our area at the good old IRS.. It took several months of worrying about losing our house and having to repay what we didn’t owe in the first place to keep them from putting a lein on the house and cars. Then we get a letter with a check saying, oh sorry our mistake here is your check back..  (paraphrasing of course, but you get the gist)

Maybe,  instead of this obvious, generous amount of people who owe the IRS huge amounts of back taxes being forgiven, they had to pay their taxes like the rest of us hard working middle and lower class americans, we wouldn’t have to watch our taxes go up, yet again, next year.

What is wrong with America???.