As we are reminded every Christmas of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, it is well to remember, that as a small businessman, he had a point. “A day older, and not a penny richer” is precisely what’s wrong with Christmas for a person with payroll to meet, except that these days, the revenue downtime is far more than one day’s worth.

As a self-employed consultant in the early 1990s, my two most dreaded times of year were Christmas and August. As both approached, contracts that one had spent months selling and negotiating would be sucked into a vortex. In August, European clients would start going on vacation in early July, and then generally stagger their vacations so that the 2 or 3 people you needed to reach agreement on a deal were never there at one time. Needless to say, commitments that had been made in late June were worthless by early September.

Christmas was even worse. The vacation itself was shorter, although long enough in places like Britain, where employees “bridge” between Christmas and New Year, and then add the remainder of both weeks, or in Catholic countries, where January 6th added a further excuse for procrastination to the mix. However, it coincided with the new calendar year, and the new fiscal year in most organizations. The chance to move in a “new direction” never seemed to include signing and implementing the contract on which one had spent so much time.

Needless to say, at Christmas the social obligation to appear cheerful at the endless Christmas parties, and to buy expensive gifts for friends and family merely made the agony worse. Personally, I always found it therapeutic, in the dead period between Christmas and the New Year, to make up the year’s accounts for the business. This tedious and gloomy task seemed only too well suited to the general spirit of the season.

Apart from the self-employed and small business, there are others who suffer economically from prolonged holidays, or the excessive seasonality that they bring. To give one example, Croatia, where I worked for several years, has an entire economic system that is geared to the central European habit of taking the whole of August and most of July as a vacation.

Thus the whole of the Adriatic coast, one of Europe’s premier resort areas, is given up to cheap concrete hotels, which charge everything the market can bear for a month or so a year, and are then completely empty for eight or nine months. There is no attempt to provide better hotels, with more facilities, which would attract tourists in spring or fall, when the Adriatic climate is generally very pleasant (as of 2000, for example, there was not a single functioning golf course on the coast.)

The seasonality affects the entire economy; the Croatian kuna is a weak currency, with severe balance of payments problems, from October to June, and then in July and August becomes so strong that there are frequent physical shortages of currency in the coastal resorts, with tourists unable to buy local currency for their shopping and supplies.

Another example is the toy industry, whose financial instability derives very largely from its extreme seasonality. In other industries, such as clothing, in which fashion plays a large part, it is possible by clever buying to adjust your product mix for movements in fashion, and thus recoup later in the season any buying mistakes that are made early on. In toys, this is impossible; production and buying decisions are made on the basis of toy fairs in January or February, and are then more or locked in for a gradual build-up to a tsunami of consumer spending between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Toy companies are thus forced to sustain high finished goods inventories around September, high accounts receivable around Christmas and an annual wave of bad debts and worthless inventory in the beginning of each year. Of course many of them go bust — it’s an impossible business model.

On the buyer side, too, it is extremely dangerous to have so high a percentage of consumer spending concentrated in such a short period. Inevitably, consumers who are able to budget effectively for ten months of the year overspend heavily in two periods: the annual summer vacation and the Christmas season. Naturally, some of the overspending turns out to be excessive, so that the debt which results, whether or not compounded by illness or job loss, cannot successfully be paid down thereafter. Of course, with the U.S.’s current feeble bankruptcy laws, this is not too serious for consumers themselves; they simply default on their debts, and are forced to keep spending at a more modest level for seven years thereafter.

One cannot entirely blame them — the social and media pressure towards spending, at Christmas particularly, is such as to warp even the relatively blase. Naturally, however, the greatest sufferers from these effects are the poorer citizens, generally with a less sophisticated understanding of economics, who may well not realize until afterwards that they have terminally overspent.

So what’s the solution? You can’t abolish Christmas. Well actually, in an increasingly pluralist society, you could.

Schedule Kwanzaa so that it coincides with the harvest that it purports to celebrate, and not with Christmas.

Make Ascension Day a public holiday, so that Christians can enjoy a festival of gift giving in May rather than in December.

Encourage retailers to popularize gift giving at the Moslem festival of Eid, which rotates through the year according to the Moslem calendar.

Allow the World Bank/IMF duo to create a holiday around the concept of globalization. Of course, such a holiday should ideally be celebrated on Columbus Day, since Christopher Columbus was the arch-globalizer of the renaissance. Native Americans, like other anti-globalization protesters might however object. In that case the holiday can celebrate the Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho, whose epochal voyages of 1405-33 only failed to discover America or to reach Europe because budget cuts made him abandon further voyages when success was in sight.

Unsuccessful globalization, after all, fails to disturb any indigenous peoples, and might be thought to represent the World Bank and IMF’s mission in its quintessential form.

Stagger the U.S. summer school holidays by state, so that Virginians and southwards are not compelled to take vacations when it is far too hot for civilized people to undertake outdoor activity, and Floridans are not compelled to take them during the hurricane season. The 10 week U.S. summer vacation is in any case grossly detrimental to the child’s learning process. Split the vacation period, so that in the South students could take off the months of May and October, when the weather is best, while in Florida they could take off December and April, outside the seasons for either snow-bird tourists or hurricanes. New Englanders and upper Midwesterners would of course retain summer holidays as at present, since at no other time can the roads be relied upon to be passable.

By such measures the holiday and vacation seasons can be spread evenly throughout the year. Revelers can still enjoy their time off, with family or otherwise, while small businesses can concentrate on those customers that are not on vacation, toy retailers and resorts can smooth out their cash flow, and workaholics can ignore the whole business.

It won’t happen. But it’s a pity because such a change is probably worth 5-10 percent on Gross Domestic Product, with a correspondent increase in tax revenues and balancing of the federal and state budgets. Only outdated convention prevents this desirable change.

As Scrooge said, “Bah, humbug.”

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.