The Spirit of Giving.

In Hollywood, we celebrate Christmas by sending elaborate gifts to people who don't need them. Every agent, studio executive, network president and entertainment lawyer sends every writer, actor, agent, studio executive and network president they're in business with (or want to be) some kind of gift. Food is popular, as are small electronics.

We also mark the season by firing all our low-level employees, forcing them off the payroll and onto state-sponsored unemployment benefits for the two-week holiday spanning Christmas and New Year's. Then we rehire them the first Monday in January. A hugely profitable television production company did just that last week, claiming that it needs to "make economies to compensate for our increased level of executive gift-giving." In other words: we're doing so much business that we can barely afford to send everyone presents. See you in January.

In what I now realize were the Fat Years, my televison writers' office was a Christmas Wonderland. Baskets and baskets of fruit and whisky and horrible-tasting Italian cookies jostled for space among the flowers and useless crystal items. The office reception area was thronged with messengers and deliverymen bearing gifts. One year, a television network sent out large red footlockers filled with candles and doodads and, oddly, a terry-cloth bathrobe. The thought of emerging from the shower, naked and dewy moist, and wrapping myself in something that came from the president of a television network was just too creepy. I gave it to my assistant.

In fact, most gifts end up with the assistants. After all, in Hollywood it's the thought that counts. We don't care if the baked goods are stale, if the wine is obscure, if the bathrobe is creepy, or if the last thing we want is a weird crystal toe-shaped thing with the AOL Time Warner logo on it. We just want it, wrapped and delivered. We just want to know that we're loved, even if only by a corporation's computer-generated, people-we're-doing-business-with-this-year list. And then we want to give it to our assistant, whatever it is.

A lot of entertainment-industry types treat their assistants in a way that Ebeneezer Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit, would envy. Not us. In our office, we have always given out Christmas bonuses to our employees. Cash bonuses, by the way, and fairly generous ones, we thought. In years when we have a television series ...