MADISON, Wis. — Local screen printer Peter Taylor admitted he could really use the $10 check his grandmother would send him every Christmas until her passing in 2008, confirmed sources close to the destitute man.
“I have a steady job but I’ll be brutally honest, between bills, rent, my cat needing kidney medication, and the overall price of living, ten bucks would really go a long way right about now,” Taylor explained while making a student loan payment. “Grandma has been dead for fifteen years now but I always think of her this time of year and how I wish she was still with us so she could help relieve some of my financial burden. It’s weird that I used to joke about how ten dollars was like nothing but now it would help me keep my head above water.”
Taylor’s parents feel their son is failing to remember all the other good traits of his grandmother.
“Peter seems to think his grandmother was just a cash cow and always talks about how reliable she was on his birthday and on Christmas. This from the kid who never went to visit her when she was alive. I think he’s just hinting that he wants us to send him money,” said Peter’s father Roger Taylor while relaxing by the lakeside of his second home. “What he should be doing is pulling himself by his bootstraps and doing an honest day’s work. By the time I was his age, I already paid off my house and had a healthy 401K, and I never got money from my grandparents. At least not until I inherited their money when they died.”
Economists, however, are noticing a trend in millennials and gen-xers pining for the days of getting money as a gift.
“Studies have actually shown that the money grandparents give for special occasions is what is keeping the economy afloat lately,” economist Dr. Patricia Barnes explained. “If these reserves of checks in a birthday card dried up then America would fall into a pretty severe depression. They may not know it, but when a Grandfather palms a twenty when he shakes his grandson’s hand, that is the backbone of the middle class.”
As of press time, Taylor was seen digging through piles of paperwork in hopes of finding the $50 savings bond his grandfather gave him when he was seven.