Jobless couples manage to find holiday spirit

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAYBrian and Salena Smith and their two toddlers had an awesome Christmas last year.Two good jobs, a sweet house in a new Southern California suburb, and bright dreams for 2010 made it so. He strung lights on the roof. On the front lawn, he stood wooden soldiers that he had made. She made a festive meal, including honey-baked ham and pumpkin pie.

This year, it's nearly all gone.

The Smiths are among nearly 300,000 married couples across the nation who both used to have jobs, but now are unemployed.

Now, both Smiths, jobless since June, live in space carved out of her parent's garage in Whittier, Calif. It's 40 miles from their former home in Fontana, a place they've been trying to sell since late spring, when they stopped paying the mortgage.

"It was food or gas or the mortgage," Salena recalls.

Now, the toys under the tree for Isabella, 4, and Nathanial, 2, were donated by the Whittier Area Community Church. The church, which they joined in June, also runs the ministry where they pick up donated food on Fridays.

The tally was 290,000 in 2009, the last full year of statistics -- almost four times as many unemployed couples as there were in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Those numbers come to life for Chris and Alexis Rago of Chicago, now expecting their second child. This is the second holiday season in which the Ragos have both been out of work.

Their hardships are clear, their challenges daunting. Yet this holiday season, both families are trying not to think about foreclosed dreams, dashed credit ratings or diminished gift offerings for themselves and their kids.

Instead, they're focusing on the meaning of the holidays. They stand on all they have not lost — faith, love and charity. They lean on each other and reach out to help others. And they don't look back. They say they're out of work, not out of spirit.

"You would think this could be our worst Christmas ever, but it's not," says Salena Smith, 29. "We are really experiencing the spirit of love and generosity from family and friends and our church. That's really what Christmas is all about. It's not lost on us.

"I grew up poor. But my family taught me you don't give up. You just have a fighting spirit. You work and you pray and blessings will come," says Salena, a college graduate who originally planned to teach.

'There will be another house'

Salena and Brian met when both were working their way through school as ride operators at Disneyland. They were married in July 2004.

"After we got married, my priority was to start a family. I never went back to get my (teaching) credentials," Salena says.

She was happy as a teaching assistant in junior high schools, but her $1,000 to $1,500 a month earnings were disrupted by time off when the kids were born. By 2009, full-time assistant jobs vanished. Salena switched to substitute teaching, earning up to $165 a day, when the calls came. They rarely come now.

Brian, 29, had loved the work at Disneyland. But $9 per hour wasn't enough income for a family man he so switched to the elevator trade, starting out at $20 an hour and rising to $50 an hour as a mechanic specializing in elevator construction.

When the California economy nosedived, Brian saw layoffs coming. They began preparing for the worst.

In May, the Smiths stuffed their possessions — furniture to Christmas decor — in their garage in Fontana, the house they had bought for $420,000 for in 2005, using the proceeds from their first home as a down payment and relying mostly on Brian's income, $60,000 a year at the time.

After the housing market dived, they listed it for sale at $195,000 and moved in with to Salena's parents.

In June, Brian's boss met him on the job and gave him his last check. His union benefits now cover their health insurance.

"A part of us was a little heartbroken that we had to leave our house," Brian recalls.

"We did a lot of upgrades. Our kids came there. We had great Christmases there. We keep telling ourselves, 'Hey, we are Christians. We can't be attached to the things of this world.' It was a great house, but there will be another house later in our lives."

Today, his $450-a-week unemployment check and her sporadic income goes quickly for food and clothes for the children, utilities, a car payment and gas. The Smiths are still paying $150 a month to keep the lights and water on at the Fontana house. A potential buyer is trying to close a deal with them, and they hope the house will be sold in January.

"I'd definitely go back to elevator work if they called," Brian says. "But right now there are a lot of people in the trade out of work. No one is really hiring at all."

Yet he's constantly preparing for the day someone will. He spent $120 to earn a license to operate forklifts. The couple both earned licenses to teach cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. When no offers came to teach paid CPR classes, they began volunteering with the Red Cross. Sundays, he volunteers guiding cars in the megachurch's parking lot.

The plan for January is to cash out all they have in Brian's retirement fund, $26,000. They intend to use the $18,000 after taxes to knock off her car payment, their credit card bills and cover a course to train and license Brian to drive hazardous waste trucks.

Salena confidently foresees the day there's money in the bank once more. "I don't have a doubt that we will fail to pull through," she says. "The Bible says God even provides for the birds of the fields. Why wouldn't God provide for us?"

Until then, her parents babysit while he knocks on doors, giving out flyers promoting his services as a handyman or scours the Internet for job opportunities.

They scraped aside a few dollars every week so they could stay Christmas Eve at a Motel 6 in Big Bear, up in the mountains nearby, to relax and celebrate the holiday. The kids love to play in the snow, Salena says. And she may sing her favorite holiday song, a jazzy arrangement of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

A series of blows

The Rago family finds a brief spiritual respite every Friday evening from the exhausting stress of job-hunting. This is Sabbath for the couple (Alexis is Jewish; Chris is Christian). This is when they pause to recall "how lucky we are," says Alexis, 36.

As young professionals, the Ragos moved among cities and among jobs in marketing, brand management, and event planning — jobs that often seemed to collapse upon their arrival. The last home they owned, purchased when the economy looked so good in 2005, was a $350,000 condo in the hip South Beach area of Miami Beach.

That's where they lived when they married, when she was in digital marketing, he was promoting resorts with an ad agency, and their son, Charlie, now 2, was born.

And that's where they were driven out by a series of blows. She lost her job, three hurricanes swept through, the insurance and fees on their condo skyrocketed.

Chris Rago, 42, calmly describes how the couple "bought in the housing bubble, and it popped in our faces."

Next week they expect to finish the paperwork ceding the condo back to the bank — and leaving his credit rating in tatters. The Ragos decided to return to Chicago where they had once lived, closer to her parents' emotional support and babysitting help, and, they hoped, a better job market.

It was, at first. Alexis landed a $107,000-a-year job doing marketing strategy for a digital agency in 2009. They sold their 15- and 18-year-old cars and accepted the gift of a 1999 Volvo from her parents.

Chris left his Miami job to begin the still-fruitless search for work in advertising and marketing. Then, in November 2009, Alexis was laid off.

As the 2010 holidays arrive, Chris says, "We never imagined there would be two holiday seasons in a row without work."

To celebrate their holidays, Chris nabbed a deeply discounted coupon for a spa massage for Alexis during Hanukkah. He asked that there be no Christmas gift for him. They splurged on a toy train layout (half-price at $80) for Charlie.

They staggered through 2010 with her $550-a-week unemployment payments in fits and starts. Each time she landed a short-term paying project, she'd have to drop the unemployment benefits, then reapply when the project finished. He worked for several months as a Census taker. Today, Alexis and Chris will wrap up several weeks of work organizing Santa photos at airports. Then what?

Chris forecasts boldly, "We've been successful in the past and we will be again." Alexis' bravado briefly wavers — their baby is due in June, just days before the health insurance left from her last full-time job runs out. But her mood quickly revives.

"We keep it in perspective," she says. "We are healthy. We have a roof over our heads. We may struggle month to month, but when push comes to shove, we're still lucky."

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