Yes, Virginia, Santa <i> Can </i> Change a Twenty

OK, here’s what I really think has been going on around here lately: You know that couple of billion dollars the county has lost? And you know all the time the Board of Supervisors has been spending behind locked doors?

Well, I suspect they actually spent the money buying us all presents and have been using every waking minute locked away wrapping them.

Boy, are we going to be chagrined come Christmas morning when we see those gifts under the tree and the exhausted supervisors back in their public seats, with paper cuts and Scotch tape in their hair.

I bet we’ll wish then we’d gotten them presents too, if only we’d any money left to spend. I’d buy head Supervisor Tom Riley a pony if I could, but he’ll probably have to settle for a pull-tab necklace.

Like many of you, I’m shopping on a budget this year. I do nearly every year, actually, and I’m ready to share my secrets in my new book, “Power Yule Strategies” (Random Drug Testing House; $4,300.95). Just follow my advice and you’ll have a holiday so cheap and effortless you’ll think it was Arbor Day.

For example, usually the first consideration of the holiday season is Christmas cards. How can you find something of style and quality that uniquely expresses you , while still staying under 3 cents per unit?

Impossible, you say? Hardly. Just make sure you’re on the mailing list of several card companies, which each year send you their samples. You might think it’s a disadvantage that all these cards arrive marked SAMPLE or YOUR NAME HERE. But all you need do is wrap a message around the embossed words.

You can get lovely results, such as, “When we mention YOUR NAME HERE we are filled with warm holiday thoughts,” or “Santa should have shared the cookies he did SAMPLE, for now Santa’s reindeer did him trample.”

Many years I make my own cards, just taking postcards and other things from around the house and pouring a generous helping of glitter on them. You’ll find out-of-date eggnog makes a fine glue. If you mail them as postcards, you save 10 cents, and also will find they leave a touching trail of glitter all the way from your house to their destination.

A new item I’ve seen for sale this holiday season is a banana rack, which at $7.99 is just a little wooden coatrack that suspends your--or anyone’s--bananas so that air gets to them and they ripen evenly. I suspect this is but one more of the many useful innovations that has come our way now that aerospace engineers have been freed to turn their talents away from the defense of this superfine nation.

But, before you rush out to buy several racks, you should be aware that bananas also ripen evenly when you hang them from the branches of your Christmas tree. I’ve done this a couple of years, and it not only saves you from having to buy ornaments, but you’ll find the fruits ripen so darn quickly that overnight your house will take on the festive scent of a banana barge.

I’ve got a million other tips, like how you can make oatmeal the centerpiece of your holiday meal. These tips will all save you time and money yet still have others spending the season in a desperate scramble to match your perceived generosity. But if you want those tips I guess you’ll just have to fork over for my book.

Because that’s what Christmas is all about, isn’t it: money and impressions and covering every angle?

That’s certainly the feeling I get from certain sectors of our county. Like, who ever imagined you’d have to pay Santa to have your kids sit on his lap? That’s not literally the case at malls today, but it comes pretty close.

Once upon a time, the deal was that businesses would provide the Santa and be content with the goodwill and extra sales his presence would bring. And at some malls that’s still the setup, with one catch. If your kids want a picture with Santa--and who wouldn’t with the prominent ads for the photos, and Santa’s pimply elves paying all that attention to the kids whose parents ante up--then it will cost you. At South Coast Plaza it’s $10 for a meager 5x7 photo, or save big with the $32 four-print package!

Fine. They’re providing a service, and if folks want to avail themselves of that, it’s their business. But if you want to bring your own camera, there’s a $3 charge for that. Santa’s little alcove is set up so that you can’t really see him until you’re right in there with him. It doubtless builds anticipation and surprise for the kiddies, but it also makes it nigh impossible for a money-strapped parent to snap a photo from a distance.

Is it necessary to squeeze a buck out of folks at every turn? Can’t kids sit on Santa’s lap without his woolly hand reaching into their pockets? What lasting impression will it have on young children when even Santa, who represents the spirit of giving, is giving them a ho-ho-hosing?

I was recently at a “classic rock expo” in Los Angeles where Heidi Fleiss made an appearance. She, a (for the moment, anyway) convicted panderer, wasn’t charging folks to take their picture with her, so where does that put mall Santas on the moral scale?

I was selling at this expo, so I was pretty well stuck there. Even the presence of Fleiss and a procession of grumpy ‘60s British bass guitar god guest stars didn’t put me in the holiday mood. Instead, all I saw was commerce: vendors--myself included--raking in the bucks on old rock dreams, and music fans queuing up like cattle in autograph lines to meet guys who gasped their artistic death rattles two decades ago. All these people, it seemed, were resigned to being spectators to someone else’s life.

Christmas shopping at a rock music expo is like a double whammy for me, because both Christmas and rock music are things that are supposed to be imbued with spirit, and with both, that spirit speaks most clearly to youth. By the time you’re pushing 40, it becomes an elusive murmur, so that the message is all but drowned out by the cynical sound of cash registers.

Eventually I got so bummed that I realized I wasn’t doing much to cheer matters up any. So I started selling things at half price, or less. People would offer me $10 on a $15 Beatles 45 picture sleeve, and I’d say, “No way, give me $5.” There wasn’t any particular generosity in this. I was just desperately bored, and it was more than worth the monetary loss just to see the surprise and pleasure on people’s faces. Santa should try it sometime.

I’ve been doing most of my holiday shopping at swap meets and mom-and-pop stores and sometimes get to be surprised and delighted myself by the kindness and humanity of the sales folk. Besides, where else can you find a good banana rack?