THE DREADED FEAST: WRITERS ON ENDURING THE HOLIDAYS

"It is at this special time of year that we realize how urgent is our need to foster love and faith and brotherhood and--at any rate faith, and by that I mean consumer confidence."

"When Americans, of all people, are afflicted with what singer-songwriter Roger Miller called "shellout falter"--a reluctance to spend--then the whole world is liable, as Mr. Miller put it so well in his song "Dang Me," to "lack fourteen dollars having twenty-seven cents."

"Are we going to let it be said that all we had this Christmas to cheer was cheer itself? No! Let's put the holly back in shopaholic." --from Roy Blount, jr., "Xmas Words"