Conspiring against Consumerism this Advent

Simon Barrow has posted more about Advent. This time he is talking about Advent Conspiracy.
This encourages us to ceebrate Advent with compassion rather than a bout of excessive consumerism.

The website seems to be trying to raise awareness of the great need in the world and to encourage us to help those in need this Christmas rather than merely indulge our greed and the greed of our friends and family. Their particular focus seems to be on clean water projects.

So while I think the idea is basically good, I find it a bit narrow and so likely to be limited in its appeal.

Simon Barrow seems to have extracted the nugget of a more generally helpful idea from all this for those who want to make Advent, Christmas and the rest of the year more in line with Jesus' radical message:

The distinctive element on this, it might be said, is deliberately counterposing worship to consumption. That is, the activity of receiving the world as creative gift for all in need, in contradistinction to turning the world into a sellable commodity for those with purchasing power.

In other words let us wonder at the wonderful world around us and all that we already have this Advent, so that we find ourselves sated with good things and, as a result, less hungry for the tinsel and tat and 'must have' gadget we had no idea we needed until now, which the retailers try to persuade us we want to buy.