Consumerism

Today the entire family went to make gift bags for our local Catholic Worker House, Mary House. Hubby and I try very hard to emphasize that Christmas is about Jesus and the Holy Family, not about getting lots of presents. We are blessed to have a large generous family, the kids get so many toys and things that we hold some back and divvy them out for several weeks or months after Christmas (Hubby's idea). We have very small, mostly family birthday parties because we don't want to foster the "gimmies" or "I wants" anymore than the tiny bit of commercial television that they watch on Saturday mornings. We live in a tiny house, we can't seem to get rid of anything, so we don't need a bunch of consumerism ideals ingrained into our precious gifts from God. Our children know that we love them, we don't need to buy them oodles of the latest things to prove it. There is one problem with us protecting our children from video games (they will never have a wii or Nintendo)and commercial and cable television. They have no idea what to ask for at Christmas. We will have to work on that and I'll stop ranting. I'd really like to know when Christmas changed from being about Jesus and started being about shopping?