I went to a private school from first through eigth grades because my mother didn’t feel comfortable sending me to the local public school. We didn’t have hardly any money while I was growing up and the kids at the private school lived in McMansions. I remember getting made fun of for wearing shoes from Kmart (the girls literally snickered at me). These were kids who didn’t understand the value of a dollar and had parents who bought them designer clothes and expensive toys—if the kid looked at it, the parents bought it.

I was hurt then by the way these kids were given everything because I had so little. But, nowadays it seems unfair for people to buy lavish things of any kind when some can’t even afford to eat.

It’s unfortunate that our society is build around this model that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

I grew up in a small farming community.  We kids all looked alike in school.  Worn penny loafers or the dreaded oxfords.  Faded gingham dresses handed down from older sisters or cousins.  The boys’ jeans all had patches and then newer patches over the older ones.  I had a Dale Evans lunch box… my prized possession.

One day a drug store ( no pharmacies then) opened, and a new girl was in our third grade class.  I couldn’t quit staring at her.  She had little black shiny shoes with white socks.  Those socks had lace trim!  Imagine that!  She had a dark pink dress with a big bow in the back and another bow in her hair.

That night at dinner, I kept talking about the new princess in school. Talking and talking. I couldn’t shut up about the princess.  It was the first time I saw my mother with tears in her eyes.

It hit home when Lily said: "It was the practice at our grade school in those days to stand and tell the class what you’d received for Christmas that year and it was gruesome because it was clear when a kid was lying or exaggerating out of shame, and I can remember being one of them."

In my family if we got a Christmas present at all, it was to be shared (no arguments—my father was old-school scary), and thus, not really one’s own present.  I recall vividly grade school show and tell, where I kept bringing in the only toy I owned outright—my teddy bear.  One kid made fun of me because I had no other toys and tried to tear Fuzzy’s nose off.  I cried that day when I went home, my mother calmed me down, and promptly sewed the dangling nose back on.  I have had that bear since I was five years old.  I am now 53 and it is one of my most precious possessions.  Fuzzy is beloved, presently a threadbare bear, and he reminds me of the sterner stuff from which I came.  A little worse for wear, both of us, but very stubborn in the belief that possessions do not make the woman.

Lily. I’m really sorry to have to intervene like this, but I simply cannot believe that Santa Clause stop servicing Detroit that early on.