[What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.]

Season’s greetings from the war-torn Pacific Northwestern front! It’s the hour of the wolf. The economy has been hijacked by cultish tech-priests. Fascist goons strong-arm the innocent with impunity. Your vacuum cleaner is spying on you. Your phone is trying to kill you. The center cannot hold.

If you’re like me, clutching your trembling loved ones close in the charmingly nuked-out ruins of this weird city, you probably only have one question on your mind: “Where can I spot a rip-roaring bargain this holiday season?”

Stick to this cost-effective guide and I’ll show you how to SURVIVE and THRIVE the mad rush this holiday season. It’s a recession, it’s a depression, it’s a combination depression-recession-tech-bubble-fascism-whatever. It’s time to save money, in spite of the fact that all is lost!

Host a holiday potluck, but don’t cook anything.

Nothing in human history is more sacred than The Feast, a gathering of family, neighbors, loved ones, and whoever is screwing around with whomever. The holidays are a season of forgetting names immediately. It’s a season of forgiveness, setting aside past judgments/betrayals and focusing on what really matters: BEING TOGETHER regardless of who bothered to prepare a dish or contribute anything.

Did you pay your rent? If yes, there is untapped social currency in your home, but only for those bold enough to host. A potluck is a great way to trick people into cooking for you. Offering up your home is an inviolable kindness for any holiday function. So why not get the most from that home field advantage?

Despite the advantages of guests delivering home cooked food to your mouth, a meal can be a social pressure cooker, especially during the holiday season. Make sure to introduce everyone and prod them with lots of questions. Keep the pressure on those guests! Between tiptoeing around touchy political conversations and heartwarming stories from years gone by, chances are everyone will be too preoccupied to clock the fact that you didn’t prepare anything.

When it’s all said and done, be ready to do the dishes. Guests will offer to help. Just say thanks for the offer and send them away with leftovers (keep some for yourself, too). Don’t give them time to consider who cooked and who didn’t make anything. Doing the dishes is a small price to pay for a day of free home cooked meals and an argument in good company.

Get crafty.

The spirit of giving is alive and well. Are you still practicing that awful hobby you picked up during lockdown? Knit a lousy cap, write a shitty poem, slap some paint on a flimsy popsicle-stick birdhouse and offload that trash. Give a second-rate piece of yourself to your friends. Nothing tells your extended family that you “tried” like home-made alcohol. Even a dumb craft from impressively unskilled hands can be made with love. Your bank account will thank you, even if your loved ones don’t.

No gifts.

Let’s just sit this one out. Every year, rampant consumerism strangles the charm out of our quaint holiday season and saps the life force of OUR PLANET! To give someone nothing for Christmas is to briefly spare them from the hell that is late-stage capitalism.

It’s obviously cheap, but where is it written you can’t be cheap for a cause? Skipping gifts is a revolutionary act and should be celebrated as such.

Think about it. Who are these kids, to be so expectant of gifts when the whole dang country is going down the friggin' tubes? The North Pole is melting, too. Santa will not save us.

We are facing seven different apocalypses colliding into each other every day. Does the enviro-eco-techno-fasci-localypse take a break for the holidays?

Does dad need a new phone to contribute to A.I.-fueled accelerationist surveillance capitalism? Maybe next year! Does your romantic partner want a new book? Link them to a three-hour Adam Curtis YouTube doc explaining why individualism cannot effectively counter the rise of global fascism. Happy Chanukah!

Better yet, answer every item on your loved ones’ wishlists with a tedious diatribe on ever-increasing disaster. Give your inner-circle the gift of readiness and dread. Give them the gift of fear.

Take psychedelics alone.

Pretty self explanatory. Stay in your room and meet God for the price of a cheeseburger.

I hope this guide will inspire you to be mindful of your finances this holiday season, no matter what you celebrate, no matter who you call family. Near or far, for better or worse, the most important thing, always, is showing up. And that doesn’t cost a thing (except for when it does, because everything costs $).

The holidays are hard. Hang in there and save on.