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Your sixth Christmas is just days away, and our home is crackling with excitement. With your brother Anthony, you are counting down the sleeps, safe in the knowledge that you’ve made it onto Santa’s list of well-behaved children. You have entered that stage of childhood for which the holidays are tailor made. You cannot conceive of the state of things as this trying year grinds to a close. You can’t imagine the enormous sense of good fortune your mom and I feel as we prepare for another happy Christmas filled with gift-wrapped indulgences. And that is as it should be.

We saw new, unsettling numbers from Statistics Canada yesterday on household debt. Collectively, we owe $1 trillion in mortgage debt as of the third quarter of this year. Meanwhile, consumer credit card debt has risen to $448 billion. Household credit market debt (consumer credit, mortgage and loan debt), measured as a percentage of personal disposable income jumped to 150.8%. That’s the highest percentage Statistics Canada has reported since it began tracking this data in 1990. It’s also higher than the debt-to-income ratios in the U.S. and Britain.