By then just 10 of the regional bank's customers used the accounts, which were for customers who wanted to create a nest egg for holiday gifts.

"In today's world, people use credit cards," said Grant Yarber, CEO of the bank, which is based in Raleigh.

Christmas clubs -- once hugely popular and aggressively promoted by banks -- are artifacts of a bygone era.

But they haven't disappeared entirely.

Anne Allen, a retired elementary school teacher who lives in Raleigh, is a big fan of the plan offered by the State Employees Credit Union. She takes money from her pension check each month and puts it in the credit union's Holiday Cash Club.

"It's wonderful to have that money at the end of October to start Christmas shopping," she said.

Allen was in the habit of setting aside money for Christmas even before the State Employees Credit Union started offering its plan, but she didn't earn any interest on it. Now, to her delight, she does.

Christmas clubs originated in 1909 at a bank in Carlisle, Pa. Some banks didn't even pay interest rates. And they charged a penalty for early withdrawal.

"When I was a branch manager, people used to love those things," said Tony Plath, a finance professor at UNC-Charlotte who worked at a Cleveland bank nearly 30 years ago. "It was kind of like forced savings. It got people into the habit of saving."

Plath recalls customers coming in weekly to deposit $5 into their accounts.

But banks started phasing out the clubs in the 1980s. Winston-Salem-based BB&T, for instance, stopped offering them about 20 years ago.

Other banks held on longer. Raleigh's First Citizens Bank had one until about a year ago.

Durham's Mechanics & Farmers Bank, one of the nation's oldest black-owned banks, still has one.

"We offer it as a convenience to our existing customers who have been doing it for years," said Lucera Blount Parker, the marketing director. "I know the numbers of participants are declining."

One reason that Christmas clubs have disappeared is that they weren't lucrative for banks.

"They tended to be very low-balance accounts with a very short shelf life," said Greg McBride, financial analyst at Bankrate.com, "That adds up to comparatively high administrative costs."

A 1927 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics noted: "So far as the banks are concerned, the Christmas club is an advertising undertaking. Only in exceptional cases does it render a profit, and then it is only a nominal one."

Demand has also waned.

"The Christmas club's decline is symptomatic of what has happened to the savings rate in this country," said Thad Woodard, president of the N.C. Bankers Association. "People just don't save like they used to."

Serious savers gravitate to savings products that pay higher interest rates, such as money market funds and certificates of deposit.

But nonprofit credit unions have stuck with the holiday clubs.

Last year a national survey found that 76 percent of credit unions offer Christmas clubs, the same as the year before and a percentage point higher than in 2001, said Katye Long, spokeswoman for the Credit Union National Association.

Among the credit unions that added the savings plans in recent years are the State Employees Credit Union and the Local Government Federal Credit Union both of which began offering plans in 2003.

This year 10,000 SECU members saved $6.5 million in the Holiday Cash Club. SECU offers the same interest rate on its Holiday Cash Plan and its basic savings account -- currently 1.73 percent -- and doesn't charge a penalty fee for early withdrawal.

"People had been asking for it," spokeswoman Leigh Brady said.

Plath said that the credit unions have an advantage that enables them to offer Christmas clubs.

"They don't have to make money," he said.