THE BELL CURVE:

The teetering economy as we approach Christmas 2008 can be looked at in several ways. What we mostly hear is disaster for retailers accustomed to booming sales and dismay from the would-be recipients of that largesse. A lose-lose situation for Santa Claus.

But it doesn’t have to be seen this way. It can also be seen as an opportunity to return Christmas to a place where gifts are measured not by what they cost but rather by what they offer in time, thought, creativity and love.

I know that sounds like it came off a Hallmark Christmas card you’d never send to anyone.

But I spent yesterday going through my Christmas memory bank and the thick file I’ve been keeping from the first crayon pictures and realize that the home-made gifts are the ones I remember best. Those I both gave and received.

My children have a much better track record at this than I do — mostly because my vision was always more expansive than my follow through. The vision caused me to flunk shop in high school — the only class I ever failed.

We were told to come up with a wood-working project that would be a Christmas gift to our mothers. Everyone else chose small and wisely — lamp bases and book ends and cutting boards. I chose a revolving bookcase — against the advice of the teacher.

And when our projects were inspected for grading all I had was a pile of wood.

He was right, of course. So I had to produce a lamp base the following semester to work off my “F,“ wondering if it would cost me a scholarship to Harvard. And hoping that if I ever had kids they would aim for revolving bookcases, too.

Well, they did. The first example that comes to mind is a gift from my younger daughter, Debby. We had tried to interest her older brother and sister in piano lessons and failed.

My son, David, left little scrawled reminders all over the house that said “Hate piano lessons, no madder what” (the bad spelling, not intentional).

So Debby was our last shot at producing a musician, and when she lacked enthusiasm for that role, we bought an organ for her to learn on. The going was tough and the results that we heard were spotty, at best, and frequently painful.

That’s where we were on Christmas morning. When we opened our gifts, Debby gave me what was clearly a rolled-up parchment of some sort that turned out to be the sheet music for George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” I thanked her profusely, unaware that she had picked up my affinity for Gershwin’s work, and especially the rhapsody.

But Debby wasn’t through. She took the sheet music to the organ, sat down and played one of the principal themes, halting but recognizable, while we all watched in awe. When she finished, she retired from music lessons, her career launched and finished with this performance. She had built the revolving bookcase.

My other daughter, Patt, has also built it, piece by piece over the years of Christmas with cards and poetry full of wondrous advice and laughter. She has created for me a “Frustrated 78-year-old Tennis Player with Bad Knees’ Survival Kit” and “Patt’s Puny Picks, a division of Track Gal Inc., the System for Bettors Not Afraid of 2nd Best”.

She has decorated my office walls at Christmas with such significant artifacts of our family life as a road sign of U.S. 66, our umbilical to Indiana; a World Series collage of the Angels’ triumph; an array of dead tickets on spectacularly bad horses we bet on because their names resonated with Midwest memories; and “Patt’s Excellent Travel Tips, Picking Up Where Frommer Leaves Off.”

The largest piece of Patt’s revolving bookcase was writing, producing and directing “Conspiracy!: the Musical,” based loosely (a wild understatement) on the Civil War novel I am presently trying to sell. Her play was put on as a birthday event but was too good not to include here in company with its home-made Christmas brethren,

Once in a great while, the creativity turns around and bites the creators. The best example I can remember came many years ago when we caught David prowling a closet a week before Christmas for an advance look at the gifts stored there.

This, of course, was against the rules, so my wife and I devised what we considered a proper punishment. We hid his gifts in very difficult places on Christmas morning and told him we were playing his game and he should look for them.

He did, for a while, but when he couldn’t find them, he sat and watched the rest of us opening gifts while the guilt built up in his mother and me. When we gave him some broad hints, he said he didn’t really need any gifts. So we ended up awash in guilt, bringing the gifts to him and trying to figure out what we had learned.

If nothing else, we had created a memorable Christmas — like the one where our dog Coco was delivered in a stocking or turkey gave way to prime rib or the year we all agreed to use the money we usually spent on gifts to drive out of the ice and snow of Chicago for a week in Florida.

So if worries about the economy bump heads with gift buying in the next few weeks, look for a run on Christmas cards.

I’ll be in the same line, trying to think of ways to be creatively brief.

And if the cards get out a little late, there’s always Valentine’s Day.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.