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?

 

Kerry Weber joined the staff of America in October 2009. Her writing and multimedia work have since earned several awards from the Catholic Press Association, and in 2013 she reported from Rwanda as a recipient of Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship. Kerry is the author of Mercy in the City: How to Feed the Hungry, Give Drink to the Thirsty, Visit the Imprisoned, and Keep Your Day Job (Loyola Press) and Keeping the Faith: Prayers for College Students (Twenty-Third Publications). A graduate of Providence College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has previously worked as an editor for Catholic Digest, a local reporter, a diocesan television producer, and as a special-education teacher on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.