You can't expect kids to go cold turkey. I have found that kids are somewhat open to the understand that this is somebody else's birthday that we're celebrating. It's certainly possible to make deep impacts on one's own life, and there's a place to start anyway, so that even if the rest of the world doesn't come along, you will have had the pleasure of a different kind of holiday. But frankly, I think the moment is pretty good for making progress. People are so sated with stuff that they've begun to ask whether they want anymore, or at least they're open to that question.
People have so much stuff, they have no more place to put it.
Increasingly what we all realize we are lacking is time. Any of the things that allow substituting time for money are deeply attractive at this moment, I think. Needless to say, a long-faced campaign of austerity is unlikely to persuade people at this time. Chicken and egg questions are not my specialty. Historically, it took quite an effort to persuade Americans to become big spenders.