What Christmas stories really teach us about money
Peter McGahan
Monday 29th December, 2025.
AHH, Christmas.
‘Click’ - the record player arm drops Johnny Mathis. The scratch as the record turns and now, ‘when a child is born’ is being hummed by the rest of the family, alongside the smell of my late mum’s cooking oozing around the house as she creates food heaven for her children. The memories. That’s it.
The cost of that memory? A fraction of what’s under the tree of which I have virtually no memory. I think of the costs at Christmas and all those great Christmas stories, movies and songs, and draw comparisons.
My favourite song at the moment by Burg has the lyrics: “How much you can notice what you're already part of, and appreciate it and share it, and care about those that are around you, look out for their welfare while you are looking out for your own. That’s it. That’s it. And then you'll get to the end of it, having had an awesome time”.
Think about ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. A man on the brink, convinced he’s worth more dead than alive, learns that his quiet, decent life of helping others, building small but meaningful things was the wealth all along.
Or The Grinch, who steals all the presents, convinced he’s ruined Christmas, only to hear the Who's down in Whoville singing anyway. “It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.”
It’s not anti-money. It’s about the right relationship with money. That wealth is a tool, not a trophy.
If you ask most adults what they remember about childhood Christmases, they won’t list what they unwrapped. They’ll tell you about burnt stuffing. About grandad asleep in the chair. About the year the tree fell over.
Memories are made in the spaces money can’t buy; the ones we accidentally create when we’re not looking at our phones or racing to finish the to-do list.
There’s a lesson in that: if money is always being chased or avoided, it stops being a servant and starts being a master. Christmas, with all its noise and pressure, offers a chance to see whether that balance still holds.
Scrooge is visited by ghosts, but we all carry a few around: Financial mistakes; family dynamics. What we didn’t get as children. Some of us carry guilt or scarcity. Some carry the deep fear that no matter what we earn, it won’t be enough to fix what’s wrong.
Those stories need updating. Because like Scrooge, many of us are no longer living in the hardship which formed those habits, but we keep acting like we are. We deny ourselves joy. We confuse frugality with virtue. Or we throw money at problems because we don’t want to feel them.
And money, being neutral, simply obeys. It flows toward the emotion we attach to it.
It's worth crawling into the cockpit of your mind to those dials of frugality or alertness and resetting them back to neutral. They served a purpose when needed before, but that’s not your new world, so the dial doesn’t need to be up full whack.
Scrooge’s started when he started using his wealth instead of hiding behind it. He gave Bob Cratchit a raise, laughed again and rejoined life.
He didn’t solve poverty, but he changed a family’s trajectory and gave himself peace.
That’s the real lesson. Money is solely a tool for living. It’s there to support a life of connection, safety, and meaning, not to protect you from every possible loss or to signal your status to the world.
We don’t need to be the richest at the table, just present at it.
We don’t need perfect presents, just attention and laughter.
We don’t need to fear our money stories, we need to rewrite them.
Like Scrooge, what financial ghosts are worth letting go of this year? And what joy might we unlock if we allowed money to be a tool, not a trophy or master?
As ever, the answer is in how we use what we’ve got to shape a life we’re proud to live, and maybe even proud to pass on.
As the end of Burg’s song says: “We end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated, completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle, while actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives”
Because no matter how many coins clink in the purse, the best inheritance we leave is how we lived, not just what we saved.
If you have a financial question, please call 01872 222422 or email info@wwfp.net
Peter McGahan is the Chief Executive Officer of Independent Financial Adviser firm, Worldwide Financial Planning. Worldwide Financial Planning is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
