Gerald Foley, giving it his best shot, sat at his computer trying to make dollar sense of the Christmas forty days away. Outside, the rain dripped as steadily as predicted.

The computer, as usual, was of no help when it came to emotional values—even though Gerald’s son Jerry had shown him that it was great at bringing you around to logical answers to problems like expenditure versus income, investment versus risk and other balancing acts a farmer has to keep in the air.

Gerald’s dad, Flynn, who had inherited this farm from his Irish immigrant father, had also gone through hard times, but that playful old man had always come up with solutions. He, however, hadn’t lived to see an economy where his son could be so near losing a Foley tradition.

Gerald’s problem was that he had not only inherited the farm when his parents passed on, but along with it, his dad’s whimsical ritual. A ritual quite the opposite of Flynn’s Irish father’s faithful but joyless way of acknowledging Christmas: no tree, no decorations, only a midnight mass and extra feed for his lean cattle.

Flynn Foley, to make up for this, insisted on taking every neighbor child for hayrides (sleigh rides when snow was on) and providing hot chocolate around winter bonfires. When electricity had come, he and his wife Gerty were equal in enthusiasm, gleefully decorating their part of the world with Christmas celebration, lighting barn, silo, house, windmill and even fence tops with bright and glittering color.

Year after year, there were thousands of lights to put up, tend to and bulbs to replace. Later, after Gerty died and Flynn confined to a wheelchair, Gerald, his wife Betty, and the children took over the ritual and helped the old man with his “extravagance,” as he called it.

Now that it was theirs, Gerald realized that his father had picked the right term. Last year, the light bill for this yearly extravaganza had been $800. The uncaring computer’s message had just told him, in digital figures, “Not this year, pal.”

Knowing his own limitations, Gerald shut down the computer, which he didn’t trust or like much for not allowing values that went beyond figures. This was, after all, a family matter. Betty and the kids needed to be part of any solution to what seemed not so much a farm budget problem as a reality check.

Being easygoing, Gerald waited until Betty’s cherry cobbler desert that evening to spring his figures on the family—Emily, sixteen, Steven, in his last year of high school, and, at least in spirit, his oldest son Jerry, who hoped to be home from Iraq before Christmas.

“Guys,” he began, “you remember what Grampa Flynn used to say about Christmas every year.”

Stephen and Emily, accustomed to memory quizzes, looked up from their cobblers. Emily joked, “Will this be on the test?”

“The one about, ‘Most days for get, just one for give,’” quoted Gerald patiently, and his daughter finished it, “and Christmas tells us, ‘let’s all live.’”

“Oh, that one,” said Stephen, “I thought it would be, ‘God save all here with Christmas cheer. I’ll light the fire, you pour the beer.’”

“How about, ‘A wee light on a hilltop warms many a heart below,’” added Emily, “or, ‘A hungry neighbor means you’re a poor one.’” She shrugged at her brother’s raised eyebrows. “Quoting Grampa Foley always turns me into Hermione from Harry Potter.”

Betty, who had heard something in her husband’s tone, laid down her fork and asked, “Is our ‘give day’ in trouble?”

Gerald silently blessed his wife. “Our ‘give day,’” he told them all, “was in trouble about the same time as Wall Street, but it’s rain that got around to us. This Christmas is going to have to be more ‘give up’ than give. I think we’re going to have to give up a lot of extra stuff, including…,” he hesitated, “Grampa’s outrageous Christmas light bill.”

There was stunned silence in the room, all of them absorbing, what to the Foleys was close to a disaster. It wasn’t just the money crisis--they had been through those before--but the abandoning of Grampa Flynn’s eccentric custom of lighting his whole hilltop for Christmas and their own fun in helping him do it.

Stephen stared at his dad in alarm. “But Dad, Jerry’s coming home!”

“And the lights ARE home for him!” finished Emily.

Betty said nothing, but her expression waited for Gerald’s words.

“OK, guys, here’s what I know.” Gerald kept tab on his fingers, wishing the computer could explain facts in gentler terms. “The machinery’s been in the barn shop, since the rains started, getting overhauled and that cost a lot. We have a hundred acres of corn to pick but it’s rained for half a month and we can’t get to it. Same with soybeans. Meanwhile, the bills don’t care, and we have to pay them. On December 1st, that is, if we can stay afloat through November. Pardon the pun.”

Betty turned to the kids. “Well, maybe we could try this: leave out Grampa and Gramms’s big ‘thank you’ party for all the people who helped us with work through the year, and limit the Christmas lights to the house, like everybody else does.”

Getting no enthusiasm, she asked the kids, “How about you two? What can we come up with to keep Grampa Flynn’s lights?”

“We could borrow some money from the college fund,” said Stephen thoughtfully, and added hurriedly, “and pay it back when the crops are in.”

The family shook heads in unison; the college fund was untouchable in this house.

“I could get a job at McDonalds,” said Emily helpfully, and the looks were grimmer. Emily, the scholar, wanted to become a doctor and was doing volunteer work at the local hospital.

Betty made up her mind. “All right, everybody,” she said calmly, “we’ve got to lose the lights, but your Grampa wouldn’t have us being poor neighbors. We’ll do the Thank You Feast, like he and Gramma did, and treat kids to the hayrides and maybe a barn party ... if the money holds out.” She glanced at Gerald, knowing he felt worse than any of them. “We’re all sorry that the lights have to go, but we’re a family and Grampa Flynn would understand.”

“Understand?” asked Gerald, sadly. “Betty, the man dashed around half the night keeping fifty bonfires going, before electricity! He’d never understand a computer telling him he couldn’t do something.”

With a sigh, Betty got up. “I’m going to go check the spreadsheet again. Maybe there’s something to juggle.”

“Good luck, Mom,” her kids called after her.

A few moments later, Betty’s surprised voice came from the den. “Hey everybody, look at this! I just found the Foley Christmas bonus!”

“No way!” said Gerald, but he got up to come in with the kids to see Betty pointing. According to the glowing screen, they had twenty-five hundred more dollars in the bank than Gerald had found two hours before.

“You didn’t check e-mail,” said Betty. “There might be an explanation.… Oh my God!” she finished, as she opened an e-mail message.

“Hey Homefolks,” it began. “Everything peaceful here for the moment. I’ve just wired some Christmas money—no way to spend it here, or bring anything, so it’s all for ‘extravagance’ as Grampa would say. This will help you all get busy early, stringing up his light show, which in these times must be hard to afford. But, believe me, after this place, I’ll be glad to see anything that has actually pleased the human side of everybody for years! Details of arrival later. For now, much love to you all, Happy Thanksgiving, and leave a light on for me. --Jerry”

The family hugged each other silently, since nothing seemed enough to say and the only sound was the whir of the printer putting it on paper.

Finally, Betty, dabbing at her eyes a little, said, “I could almost hear his voice.”

Emily agreed. “That might be because it’s stopped raining.”