Som eh! oss By Trevor Doré, Opinions Editor 0, you’ve managed to go the whole S semester without breaking the bank. Just when you thought you were in the clear, Christmas rolls around. While it can be “the most wonderful time of the year,” the hustle and bustle can be stressful, especially if you’re tight for cash. Here are some tips to get through the holidays without completely depleting the bank account. © Budget: First things first, make a list and set a budget. If you make a list of all of things that you expect to spend money on, you will have a good idea what you’re working with. Making a list of the items you want to buy will also prevent wandering around the shopping mall, wasting time and money. e Homemade gifts: It’s time to get creative and make a homemade gift. Work with your strong suit whether it is music, poetry, filmmaking, carpentry, painting or picture taking, cooking or baking. Giving a homemade gift is often -- How to save money over the holidays yourself gives them that personal touch. e Give the gift of time: Personalized “gift certificates” or “coupons” can be used to give the very valuable gift of time. Time can be given in various forms. A night out, a car wash and wax, cleaning the bathroom, helping out around the house in general or committing to provide a favour are all examples of gifts of time. e Make a donation: Donations amplify and transform the gift of giving two fold. Making a donation in someone’s name lets him or her know that money has been spent to help out a cause for the greater good. Not to mention, the money ultimately goes to help someone in need. e Shop around: If you’re out of ideas or out of time and decide to hit the stores, ‘consider thrift stores or outlet malls. Winter Farmer’s Markets also offer a variety of unique, locally made items for reasonable prices. Once you have decided on a purchase, shop around. Often the Qivaros accompanied by great company provide the perfect holiday atmosphere. If you’re exchanging gifts with friends, consider establishing a limit or coordinating a secret Santa gift exchange. outlet can also provide the benefit of an employee discount. Like the retail outlets, restaurants and bars are also booming. Jolly, generous customers who have had a few too many eggnogs may result in huge better than the ubiquitous store- same item can be found in another e Work: If you find that the fall tips for you. bought gift. It shows that time store for a lower price. Don’t forget semester has left you cash less and and thought were expended in a to take advantage of your student things aren’t looking much better In the end, it is easy to go overboard process that took more than a few discount. Check out the Student for the winter semester, perhaps during the holidays. It is nice to indulge minutes of window-shopping. Some Saver card in the back of your getting a part-time job over the every once and a while just remember, examples of homemade gifts might student planner. It is accompanied by holidays is a good idea. Retail the winter semester is just around the be a picture frame or a scrapbook. a list of locations that offer discounts outlets are booming this time of corner. Imagine how nice it would be to When wrapping gifts, wrap them for students throughout B.C. year and often have opportunities start the New Year of debt free. Whatever in newspaper or recycled wrapping e Events: Instead of going out and for seasonal work, which allow you do among all of the hustle and bustle paper from the previous year. This is spending money on dinner and you to make some money and then of the holiday season, remember to relax. easier on the wallet as well as... you drinks at a restaurant, opt for a get back to school and concentrate You’ve got two weeks to recharge and get guessed it, the environment. If you potluck with a group of friends. on your studies once the holiday ready for the winter semester. L send Christmas cards, making them The variety of food and drinks season is over. Working for a retail S We need a better model for manhood Without decent examples we’re just playing at masculinity By Peter Goffin, The Silhouette (McMaster) they never complained or bragged about defending. HAMILTON (CUP)—Being a man isn’t easy. It isn’t harder than being a woman, but it certainly isn’t a carefree way to navigate through life. And nobody hands you a manual when you turn 16 that tells you how to do it. For all the talk that’s bandied about around finding strong female role models, very little is ever said on the struggle to find a decent model for manhood. And while it is important for girls to have strong, capable women to emulate, it is no less important for boys to get their heads right on what they are supposed to grow into. All we have is a lot of effete preening, and cliché pseudo-manly posturing, masquerading as masculinity. What we don’t have is anything to get men and manhood back to some reasonable state of respectability. Because right now, we’re just boys, caricatures of men who will probably never be the real thing. At one time we knew how to be men. At our age, and even younger, people were | making the transition to adulthood and manhood with dignity and responsibility. God knows how they learned to act properly and we didn’t. I would guess it is largely because we stopped paying attention to the examples set by our fathers and grandfathers. Masculinity for them was a compendium of wisdom preached from atop barstools by old men who had been around and knew the score—men who worked, drank, talked and cursed the way men should, which is to say, very well. And any of it. At some point we started to ignore their brand of advice. We took, instead, to Maxim magazine and Entourage and soulless, shallow, gutless portrayals of children in men’s clothing as our templates for manhood. We lost our way. We started taking fashion advice from Justin Timberlake. Shaky ground indeed. Drowning in Axe body spray and hair gel left over from Keys to the VIP, suffocating in “bromance” and Judd Appatow’s slacker bullshit, we never had a chance. The thing is, achieving real masculinity, the basics of what being a man is really all about, is not so difficult a concept to understand. It’s about honesty and decency. It’s about believing in things and standing up for what you believe in. It’s about fighting—not being violent, going off half-cocked because someone knocks into you at a bar or getting loaded and looking for someone to hit—but fighting for something you value. Fighting for something or someone who needs It’s about being principled, and every once in a while taking a beating over those principles. Then it’s about taking your lumps and always getting up ready for more because no man is ever a loser so long as he keeps getting up. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to achieve but it is. I know I’m not perfect. I’m not the epitome of the good and decent man. I’m not even close. But goddammit, I’m trying. I’m trying to get back to some faint code that meant something to men like our dads and granddads. Maybe that ideal of the good and decent man never existed outside of old black and white movies. Maybe it has always been a construct, a shadow that boys used to chase and have long since abandoned. But whether that ideal is attainable or not, it’s an ideal worth aiming for. There is nothing wrong with being a man and there is nothing wrong with being proud about it. But you ought to at least be a good man, a reliable man, a principled man—everything a real man should be.