Buy carefully what you need and very carefully what you want. This can be very hard with the media telling us how the holidays should be. Altering expectations with 12 million catalogs delivered a year is a tall order. There is hope, and hope is the root of holiday traditions and celebrations. The Methodists recently came up with the Hundred dollar holiday.
Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition.
It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose.