“When I hear middle-class people complain about the poor buying luxuries for their kids when they don’t even have enough for groceries, I remember the lavish Christmases my mother gave us, even at the risk of breaking up the family. Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.”
