This is the season you see people socially whom you haven't seen all year. So on many occasions, sipping that eggnog, the first question that gets asked is, "What kind of a year did you have?" With the effects of a brutal recession still lingering, I wonder whether we need a special decoder to figure out this year's holiday chit-chat.
If someone says, "I'm so much more fit now that I've started walking to work," could that mean, "Who can afford the parking or transit any more?"
Or if a newly laid off woman hugs you and says, "I'm so not going to be pessimistic," should you silently attach "or I'll go crazy" to the end of her statement?
To complicate things further, just in time for the festive season, we are seeing upbeat reports that our wealth is bounding back, our little houses are again worth more than the Taj Mahal, and even the auto industry is able to sit up and take a little nourishment.
Yet few people I talk to say they feel truly secure again, let alone affluent. You can't go through months of absorbing daily discouraging news about "the worst recession since the Great Depression," you can't anxiously pare down your own spending, you can't see friends and relatives lose their jobs or even misplace one yourself, and you certainly can't observe how the U.S. economy is still in bad shape, and then overnight banish the worry. It has wormed its way inside of you, where a small voice whispers, "What next?"
People out there looking for work are certainly not feeling secure. They are wondering if the rebound will mean a quick way back into the job market come January - or whether they will still be out in the cold. At least in a widespread recession, misery has lots of company, and individual failure is somewhat muted. But what if the economy rebounds and you still can't find work? What does that make you?
So maybe the real question that should be asked is one that looks forward not back. How do we jump-start not just the economy, but our own delicate psyches?
Economists have long been fascinated by collective mindsets that produce either strikingly negative or positive economic climates. You could argue, as U.S. author and financial guru James Grant did in his book The Trouble With Prosperity , that it was "the loss of fear" that produced an economic collapse. (Only he argued this about the collapse in the nineties, which was just a modest warm-up to what we've been through.) Well, there's no end of fear now, as evidenced by the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney bluntly warning that individual Canadians could bring down the whole recently reconstituted economic shebang if we don't get our household debt in order. (All the while keeping interest rates low so we can presumably spend, spend, spend.)
Or as the mega-popular - and bizarrely uber-tanned - pop financial adviser Suze Orman said on Larry King Live recently, staring sternly out at all the folks at home: "Would ya just not spend what ya don't have?"
Most financial advisers will tell you similar things about how to approach the coming months: Clean up your credit-card debt, make sure you have several months worth of savings - Ms. Orman says eight is a prudent number - to help you get by if the sky falls in, and then resume spending, albeit cautiously.
And I would add this: Pay attention to what you hear this season over the buffet table. People may not go into great detail about their finances, especially if they are rocky. But a whole year of public focus on the ravages of recession has at least given people more cultural permission to talk about their economic travails in general.
Out on the circuit, I haven't needed that social decoder yet. I've been struck by how honest some of the people have been about the "terrible" year they've had. Or their need to find work. (If you don't use the season to network for jobs, you're truly crazy.)
Unless of course you fall into that time-honoured category of just wanting to forget it all and have a good time. In which case, the answer to "What kind of year did you have?" is a wink and a determinedly upbeat: "Fabulous! Is there any other kind?"
With any luck you'll be able to say it again next year and mean it.