• Hide all incoming sale flyers and discourage Saturday morning cartoon watching. Avoid trips to the mall and toy store.
  
• Develop inexpensive family traditions such as attending the local church play, stringing popcorn and cranberry garlands, and driving to see the gaudiest light display in town.
  
• Exchange gift lists to discourage duplication.
  
• Give useful, high-quality homemade gifts. You can trade your particular gift-making skill with a parent who possesses another skill. Or trade your skill with another family for used but very good outgrown toys.
  
• If you're married, agree with your spouse to purchase a combined gift instead of buying separate gifts for one another.

Mrs. Dacyczyn says Christmas giving was one of the last things she and her husband learned to scale down. Their first Christmas cost over $500. Seven years and four kids later they were giving away 50 presents for $150, including wrapping, postage, and tape.

"We now rely more on resourcefulness than on dollars," she says. "One year a sister wrote, ‘As usual some of my best presents come from you.' We have let ourselves off the hook and no longer feel we have to purchase something wonderful for everyone. We do expend money if we feel someone has a genuine need or is going to have a lean holiday."

One of the best ways to save money at Christmas is buying right after the Christmas season and all throughout the year. Look for items marked down as much as 50 percent. You also may find used items at yard sales in new condition. And items like camping equipment may be good bargains when they're out of season.

With Christmas just around the corner, this probably will be of little consequence to you this year, so don't become discouraged. After all, scaling down Christmas is a gradual process, but you can still take a giant step this year by stamping out credit.

This will hurt your pocketbook more, since you'll have to pay up front, so you'll probably be more cost conscious. You're likely to spend less in the long run, because Christmas on credit can be an expensive proposition that lingers for months.

"As bad as commercialized Christmas is, commercialized Christmas on credit cards is even worse!" said Larry Burkett. "Many families literally indenture themselves to creditors for a whole year just to buy some useless junk at Christmas. Yet, gift giving is an area totally under our control."

One way to get more control of your Christmas giving is to make some of your gifts at home. If you have small children, or did at one time, you probably remember at least one occasion when you bought them an expensive toy, only to watch them play with the box.

Children will often forsake their toys for more interesting items like boxes or wrappings, mothers' pocketbooks, laundry baskets, or adult shoes. That's why homemade gifts may actually be more enjoyable for children than items purchased at a toy store.

Most of the women's magazines offer homemade gift ideas in their December issues. These usually require store-bought kits or materials, but numerous gifts can be made from items you already have at home. Mrs. Dacyczyn offers a number of ideas.

• Bean bags—Use durable material scraps and dried beans. Decorate with rickrack, gold braid, and other remnants in your sewing basket.
  
• Toy pocketbook—Fill a thrift shop purse with a ring of old keys, a wallet with play paper money, pictures, and an empty compact.
  
• Play food—Save all small food containers like spice cans and plastic containers. Also look for plastic fruit—not grapes—at yard sales.
  
• Doll clothing—Use little scraps in your sewing basket to make new outfits for your child's special doll.
  
• Gingerbread cookies—Decorate and customize with your child's name.
  
• A dress-up box—Fill with yard sale finds or items donated by your "Great Aunt Ethel."
  
• A new paint job—Instead of buying a new bike or wagon, surprise your child by giving the old one a face lift. Use steel wool to remove rust and clean off any dirt and grease.

Of course, gifts are not the only expense that most of us experience at Christmas. Wrapping paper adds to the cost and is often thrown away once it's used.

"Reusing wrapping paper is an idea that must be as old as Christmas," Mrs. Dacyczyn says. "Be creative and put a bow where old tape left a hole smack in the middle of an otherwise perfectly good chunk, or plan your ribbon placement to hide an old fold.

"Also consider alternative wrapping. This includes comics from the Sunday paper, shelf paper, the paper from a bouquet of cut flowers, a piece of fabric, wallpaper, or the paper or plastic from a colored department store bag."

Used ribbon saved from last year is useful if it's gently ironed to make it look fresh again, and instead of buying gift tags, you can make them yourself at home.

Postage is another area outside of gifts where you can save money this Christmas. If you mail to different households in the same town, consider combining packages into one, Mrs. Dacyczyn says. Even though the total weight is the same, it is cheaper to mail one big package than two small ones.

Regardless of what you give, how you wrap it, or how you ship it, your gifts should be selected based on needs, a reasonable budget, and internally generated desires, not those that result from advertising.

"The fact that an advertiser has created a desire in your child by showing him [or her] a product scores of times does not mean you must succumb," Mrs. Dacyczyn says.

In the area of needs, children often have toys that can be added on to, such as train sets. Clothing for a doll is another example.

Targeting needs also works well for senior citizens, who are sometimes difficult to buy for. "Consider replacing something they have that is worn out," Mrs. Dacyczyn says. "Some with a fixed income may have a financial need, so cash given for a specific purpose is acceptable. A good strategy is to give them expendable presents such as soap, stationary, or something edible."

One edible item that makes an excellent gift is homemade candy, like that made by Mrs. Dacyczyn's husband, Jim. One year the family purchased tins for the candy in January and saved them for the following Christmas. Mrs. Dacyczyn made labels for the tins, which contained a mixture of six to eight varieties of "Jim's True Confections."

Expendable gifts and homemade gifts represent a stark contrast to the hyped-up, expensive items that fade in and out of popularity with each Christmas season. However, they can be more valuable simply because they're useful.

"We give a myriad of useless gifts at Christmas because it's expected of us, and we feel guilty if we don't," Burkett said. "The commercialized world now makes a $100 toy for kids seem perfectly normal. The practice of giving gifts is not the problem, just as the use of credit is not the problem. It is the misuse of these things that entangles us and diverts attention from Jesus Christ to material things.

"We have enlisted in God's army and now find we can't identify the real enemy. Our problem is that we keep trying to negotiate a compromise with an enemy who is totally dedicated to destroying us—Satan. It's time that, as Christians, we decide to draw a battle line again."

"No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier" (2 Timothy 2:4).