364 Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217

My cousins own a restaurant/bakery in Boerum Hill in Brooklyn. They have had a really rough year or two. They sell a lot of pies, etc, for Thanksgiving and she always makes beautifully decorated cookies that look like turkeys. Last year, she had to give them all away - people will buy a pie, but wouldn't waste money on something like a $4.50 cookie that is just an extra. This year, she sold more than half of the turkey cookies. I call it the Turkey Cookie Index. An economic indicator that people are more willing and able to buy a little something extra that they don't really need this year.

This story comes from my mother, who is a perennial recipient of mail-order catalogues. This holiday season she has noticed a proliferation of goods embossed with a version of the 1939 poster issued by the British Government as Hitler's Luftwaffe geared up for attacks on the U.K.. The slogan: "Keep Calm and Carry On" was designed to assuage the fears of an understandably nervous public. That it would re-appear today is not surprising given The Great Recession. But the message of uplift, to me anyway, is also pernicious because it asks us to part with our money (to purchase the totebag or handtowel - see .jpg) in spite of a real need for fiscal responsibility.

3706 Park Avenue, Weehawken, NJ 07086

We here in Weehawken are seeing a small business exodus! I am the owner of a restaurant that has been here for nearly a decade, but watching 4 business on my block close in the past few months makes me very nervous! Myself, my employees and my loyal guests are all very scared that our town is moving out, never to return, and we will have to be next to go!

Ridgewood, NJ

I fix computers and people need computers no matter what. My customers would rather fix a broken computer than spend the money to buy new. It's still a throw away society but perhaps we are not throwing away so quickly with high ticket items.

36 Hawthorne Place, Apt 4u Montclair, NJ 07042

My husband and I are in our mid 20's, recent graduates, newly married and living in the metro area. This is certainly an interesting time to be laying foundations. While we're so incredibly lucky to both have decent (though by no means ideal)jobs and live in a relatively nice area, the turn in the economy has forced us to reevaluate our expectations for the future, dream a little more conservatively and plan a lot more practically. There's certainly no place for starry-eyed youthful optimism these days. The necessary pragmatism of the times is, instead, a real test of character: applying for job after job, accepting the non-use of your degree, scaling down your dreams, learning to value people and heart and integrity instead of a high-profile lifestyle. The stuff this economy is made of has a way of revealing the stuff we're made of.