Once upon a time, the holiday season was supposedly a quiet time spent with family and friends ? simpler, less commercial, more spiritual, nothing like today?s frenzied orgy of soulless consumption.

“There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1850. By then, the holiday was already well on its way to becoming the retail orgy it is today.