When the holidays get started in earnest next week, the town will again embark on a season of heightened sensibilities with a celebration of Thanksgiving. Elsewhere, the fulsome holiday spectacle of twinkling lights and jingling cash registers seems to go a little farther over the top with every passing year. But in Newtown the sense of what we have, etched as it is in high relief by what we have lost, has an authentic value worthy of our deepest thanks. It is this extra awareness of the fragile boundary between having and not having that made a report this week by the United Way of Connecticut about the extent of economic suffering in this affluent state, county, and town so unsettling.

The United Way reported that a quarter of the households in the state, while living above the official federal poverty level, are still unable to afford the basic living expenses in Connecticut. This economically stressed population has been christened ALICE (Assets Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) by the United Way. Including those officially identified as impoverished, 35 percent of the households in Connecticut are living below this critical ALICE threshold, where choices must be made every month about which bills not to pay. The numbers are not that much better in Newtown. About one in five local households (19 percent) fall short of the ALICE threshold.

Sustaining a stable home life under such economic constraints is nearly impossible. And stability is essential for children as they try to launch themselves on an academic arc that escapes the grim gravity of constant privation. When everything is a problem — paying the mortgage or rent, finding child care, seeing the doctor, keeping the car running, buying milk, calming the mind enough to get a good night’s sleep — nothing is easy, not even making it to tomorrow let alone some distant bright future. With 35 percent of the households in the state facing this precarious reality, we have to ask ourselves: Just how robust is this economic engine we keep talking about in Connecticut?

As a state with some of the nation’s highest household incomes, the flash of affluence can distract us from a sobering economic reality. “There is no sugar coating it,” says Richard Porth, president and CEO of United Way of Connecticut. “We are losing middle skill jobs and replacing them with service sector jobs that are low pay.” In Newtown, a family of four needs full-time employment with a cumulative hourly wage of $31.80 ($63,606 annually) to cross the ALICE threshold. Increasingly, service sector jobs are not clearing that hurdle.

The holiday season is a time of heartfelt solicitude, and contributions to food banks, holiday basket programs, and social service outreach are welcome and essential to sharing the light of the season with those facing the darkest prospects. But filling in the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots in our state will require opportunities rather than donations. Anything we can do individually and collectively to leverage the skills and initiative of Connecticut’s endangered middle class we must do. It all begins with educational opportunity, which starts not at the schoolhouse door but at the kitchen table. Stable households are the cornerstone of successful schools. And successful schools are the gateway to that distant and elusive bright future.