Andrew, my oldest child, is obsessed with money and the things it buys. He becomes giddy at the sight of crisp dollar bills, the sound of silver jingling in a coat pocket.

Our children get an allowance each Sunday and, of the three, he is the first to demand it and the first to spend it. Their take is $3 each, with the stipulation that the first dollar goes into the collection plate at church, the second is to be saved in their piggy banks and the third dollar can be spent as they wish. No sooner does Andrew get his dollar to spend than he is champing at the bit to indulge his fantasy: baseball cards, a die-cast plane, a new ball.

Over time Andrew has learned the advantage of saving for something big rather than frittering his allowance on a cheap toy that rarely lasts the car ride home. A first grader, he now has a firm grasp on numbers and a beginning appreciation for value: $10 is worth more than $5 and takes longer to save, but you can buy something a little better as a result. Which is not to say that Andrew always lives within his means. Many’s the time my husband and I have overheard Andrew negotiating with his sisters for a hefty loan on their allowance for some plaything he desires: “You’ll love it, you’ll really love it,” he earnestly assures them.

There’s a fine line, I’ve discovered, between giving your children whatever they desire and spoiling them rotten. As a child growing up, my siblings and I were given gifts at Christmas, on our birthdays and, very occasionally, when we were sick (I still remember a royal blue Fisher-Price phonograph my father bought me after a nasty late-summer bout of chicken pox). There were seven of us children, and though we were certainly comfortable, my parents did not buy us presents on a mere whim.

I also remember the summer I was 10, when my rather spoiled best friend got a pogo stick for no other reason than that she wanted a pogo stick. I loved bouncing on that pogo stick of hers more, I think, than my friend did. So much so that she suggested I ask my parents to buy me one. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to wait until my birthday.” Come September, and my birthday, I got my pogo stick. While my friend had long since tired of hers, I spent hours practicing until I could navigate our driveway at top speed.

My children, on the other hand, seem to get gifts almost daily. Not from their father and me but from their grandmothers, 15 aunts and uncles, 18 cousins and family friends. When one child has a birthday, the other two get a token gift. (“They’re so little,” I’m told by a doting relation. “They don’t understand why one’s getting a present and they’re not.”) It certainly keeps the peace but I think it mars an important lesson: sometimes you get and sometimes you just have to wait.

Andrew has already chosen his birthday present from us this year: an aircraft carrier complete with electronic sounds and eight planes and four helicopters. It cost $49.95–an amount I told Andrew it would take him nearly a year to save. I thought that might make a connection for him between the dollars in his piggy bank and the credit-card number I recite over the telephone. But he was too busy flipping through the catalog for what he “really, really” wanted for Christmas.

I don’t begrudge him his desire but I wonder how I can really celebrate his birthday. What gift can I give him that he will cherish as I have the pogo stick and the phonograph?

Recently I came across an obituary of Pepi Deutsch, a Holocaust survivor who died not long ago at the age of 101. During the ’40s Pepi and her teenage daughter Clara managed to stay together through a Hungarian ghetto, deportation, Auschwitz-Birkenau and three detention camps. They suffered bone-breaking labor, the brutalities of the German soldiers and near starvation–surviving at one point on a daily ration of three slices of bread and a soup of potato peels.

In January 1945 Pepi also found a way to celebrate her daughter’s 17th birthday in the labor camp: she hoarded her three slices of bread, coated them with marmalade and created a birthday cake.

Andrew is too young to appreciate this parable of sacrifice. But as I make his party plans, I can’t get Pepi’s story out of my mind. When Andrew blows out the candles on his Carvel ice-cream cake, I know I’ll be thinking of that other cake. And someday, when he’s a bit older, I’ll tell him about Pepi and the things that no money can ever buy.