If you're hoping to fill your Advent season with something more than overcrowded stores and stocking stuffers, adventconspiracy.org has a few suggestions: Give others the gift of your time and talents. Then, instead of buying numerous presents, send the money you would have spent at the mall to a charity. While the idea isn't necessarily new, it's presented in a particularly compelling way in the site's well-produced video, below.
The site sugggests donating money to help build fresh water wells in poor nations, but there are many ways to give of your time and money. What other suggestions do you have for trying to maintain the true focus of the Advent and Christmas seasons? How about suggestions for creative and homemade gift ideas that don't break the budget?
A big advent activity, which involves both charity and repentence, as well as justice, is making sure that if you have employees that you are paying them enough so that their children have the same standard of living as your own. If everyone did that, the Kingdom of God would exist on earth (regardless of who professes what religion).
A short little book:
Oh Holy Night: The Peace of 1914
A meditation on the meaning of Christmas revolving around soldeiers' letters to home.
http://www.christmastruce.co.uk/