Being completely fed up with the hyper commercialization and consumerism of the holiday season, as well as being agnostic & not a celebrator of Xmas, last year I decided to start using
www.justgive.org to send charitable donations on behalf of family & friends. For each person that my husband & I donate on behalf of, we customize our donation to a cause that is important/unique to that person. For example, my husband's cousin's husband went through treatment of Hodgkin's lymphoma at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, so we made a donation on his behalf to D-F. We intend to make this a yearly holiday tradition - in these difficult economic times for so many, I feel very fortunate to be in a position to give back to those organizations that do so much good & rely so heavily on contributions.