It’s Christmas week, and you know what that means: Celebrating the birth of a modest carpenter in whose person was vested the spirit of the divine by competing to out-gift one another for the affection of friends and family.

It’s like the Gospel tells us: Love thy mother, father and neighbor only in so much as, and in direct proportion to, the amount of money they can(‘t) afford to spend on you.

Since that’s what it’s come to two millennia on from the first century’s only virgin birth, methinks we might be better served to worship Carl Fox, who wisely admonished his son to never measure a man’s success by the size of his wallet.

Anyway, everyone will check out early on Wednesday, no one (other than myself and my estranged former mentor) will work on Thursday and Friday’s a lost cause too. That leaves the action to Monday and Tuesday, when markets will digest two notable US macro releases.

On December 23, the BEA will — I think — release an estimate of Q3 US GDP. It looks like the bureau, which was of course shuttered during the funding lapse, intends to deliver just one “initial” estimate (usually there are two) for the third quarter, and it’ll be accompanied by the corporate profit tally.

For whatever it’s worth to you, economists are looking for 3.2% from the headline GDP print. That’d be a deceleration from Q2’s final tally which, as the figure below reminds you, was nearly 4% by the time the revisions were all said and done.

Obviously, a 3.2% clip counts as robust in the advanced economy context, and back-to-back 3%+ readouts are impressive indeed.

Caveats abound, not least of which is that Main Street’s despondent on happy days and outright depressed on all the others. A near record share of households who describe their financial prospects as challenging blame high prices, a liability for Donald Trump.

Although last week’s inflation report suggested price growth was the coolest in years during the government shutdown, no one save Kevin Hassett took the distorted data seriously. And there’s a sense in which telling struggling households that there was basically no inflation in October and November is insulting — to their intelligence, and just in general.

Spending’s still firm, or at least it was in October. There again, though, it’s a “haves”-“have-nots” story. As long as stocks are rising and home prices hold up, the vaunted “wealth effect” can continue to support consumption as well-to-do households indulge.

But a narrow spending impulse is like a narrow stock market: Fragile. That’s especially true given that every labor market indicator (with a few exceptions) suggests hiring’s flat at best.

Shortly after the GDP release on Tuesday, the Conference Board will release consumer confidence data for December. Spoiler alert: It’ll be bad even if it’s good.

Consensus expects 92 from the headline, which would mark an improvement from November. But as the figure above shows, an in-line read would still count as abysmal. It’d take a multi-sigma upside surprise for the readout to count even as half-decent.

As for equities, markets will be thin this week, so any meaningful flow has the potential to move prices by more than it otherwise might. That leaves the tape susceptible to headline (i.e., Bloomberg red head) risk.

Fortunately, Trump doesn’t have a history of upending markets on Christmas Eve…