Christmas Spirit Quote by Phyllis McGinley

McGinley turns charity into a jukebox refrain: drop a coin, hear the tune, feel briefly absolved. The line’s sing-song politeness, with its mock-immigrant syntax ("Please to put..."), isn’t just a stylistic gag. It mimics the canned, performative voice of public appeals - the scripted cheer that makes giving feel frictionless and, therefore, shallow. You can almost hear the mall loudspeaker and the envelope-stuffing campaigns behind it. The humor lands because it’s accurate: at Christmas, generosity gets routed through systems designed to be painless, habitual, and small.

"Nickel" and "dime" are pointedly modest units. They shrink moral aspiration down to pocket change, suggesting a culture that prefers symbolic participation over costly commitment. The key verb is "trickle". Petitions don’t pour in; they seep. McGinley isn’t only needling donors for stinginess. She’s also skewering the sheer volume of asks that arrive in a season when sentimentality spikes and attention is splintered. When everyone is soliciting, any single cause becomes background music.

Context matters: mid-century American consumer culture was perfecting its holiday machinery - department stores, radio-ready jingles, mass mail campaigns. McGinley, a sharp observer of middle-class rituals, spots the seasonal bargain we strike with ourselves: a coin for a conscience, a signature for a sense of citizenship. Her wit doesn’t deny the value of giving; it questions the comfort of giving just enough to stop thinking about it.