Christmas club!

Those Christmas bills may be piling up already, eh? Sure is a good thing you started that Christmas club way back in January! 

If not, you'd better have a system 
like this!

Readers of a certain age will remember the lowly Christmas club account, in which the bank expected customers to deposit a set number of bucks each week and then pass out the dough with interest come December. The Wikipedia page concerning this topic says the first such savings device was created in 1909, and they were quite popular at least up into the 1980s. It was a means of relatively painless discipline for people who knew they would want to have cash on hand for presents and festivities at yuletide but didn't trust themselves to just keep it in a regular savings account. Christmas clubs paid very little interest, though, and charged fees if deposits were not made. 

What really killed them off, if you ask me, was the rise of the credit card, specifically the general use credit cards (BankAmericard was the first, in 1966) and the terrible curse of revolving credit. People could certainly run up debt before, but generally on an individual basis -- one account at Sears, one account with the butcher, a layaway at Penney's, one account at the tailor, a Charga-Plate at Monnig's, your tab at the watering hole, and so on. In the seventies guys would have wallets packed with plastic just for all the gas stations. A card like a Visa or American Express that could be used anywhere was a game-changer. Add debt that could be carried over month to month and the idea of worrying about being short of funds at Christmastime was gone. Also gone: the idea of ever getting out from under high variable interest payments. But never mind about that. 

Now of course we have other savings devices in place for people who fear they don't have the discipline to save without such things. Apps like Chime and Intuit's Mint are there to help the heedless spender become more heedful, or just save the pennies automatically. Which is nice. 

There was something very ennobling about the Christmas club, though, in that the bulk of the money saved was intended to be spent on others. It's one of the reasons it was often recommended as a first account for children. It's hard to get kids to think long-term, and hot desires (like that ice cream cone in August) almost always trump cold ones (like that skateboard you might have enough to buy if you skip allll those ice cream cones). But in families and places that celebrate Christmas, that could be a big enough pull to keep children in line. "Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas, upon which the entire kid year revolved," as Jean Shepherd says in A Christmas Story. 

Plus, the idea that the bank would take away some of the money if the kids didn't make a deposit was a painful lesson, and an important one. 

I think a lot of today's adults would have been helped by having the responsibility of a Christmas club growing up. I'm glad to see there are new apps that are intended to help children learn to save. I hope they are effective. But they'll never replace the excitement of getting a lump of hard-saved cash in your hand at the start of December. It was as electric as all the store window Christmas displays put together.