A few weeks ago, my friend Barry was talking to me about his grandfather and the hard life he’d led. He was an unskilled worker who lived through the depression and had been in and out of work as a result. By the time he was eligible for a pension, he had not managed to save enough money to buy a house and ended up living in a bungalow in Reservoir.

“For Christmas, he would buy us Fruit Tingles and other lollies in nice wrapping. He had a lot of grand kids. And it was all he could afford,” my friend recounted. “But we thought it was great.” “In the summer he would take us to the local pool. He’d stand and watch us playing and swimming in the water and he was as proud as punch. He never came in himself, so he had more money to buy us chips and ice cream.”

Thinking of his grandfather a tear rolled down his cheek. Barry was telling me this to illustrate a point. As a grandfather himself now, each Christmas he spends a lot of money on gifts for his grandchildren. And each year, they seem less and less impressed with what he has to offer.

“They have so much,” he laments. “I don’t know what to buy them to make them happy.” I was thinking of Barry’s words this morning while listening to the radio. An economic commentator was discussing the fact that Australians aren’t spending. While spending in Europe and America has taken a dive due to the financial crisis, there is no reason for us to not be buying. Consumer confidence is down and this is a big problem. Commentators after the last interest rate cut, bemoaned the fact that Australian consumers are more likely to save, rather than spend any extra money available to them following the cut. It’s all we’ve been hearing about in the last few months: how terrible it is that we’re not spending money. I would have thought it was not a bad thing that we were curbing this rampant consumerism – where we’re constantly feeding this need to have the latest, freshest, newest thing and where nothing satisfies us any more. Consumer culture is hard to resist.

So many things are surpassed and replaced so quickly. And it’s easier to buy something new than to get it fixed. A lap top that I purchased in 2008 for my son had a problem with connecting to the internet. When I enquired about getting it fixed, I was told it wasn’t worth it and I may as well buy a new one. I thought this was ridiculous. It was three years old. In my books, that’s not old. In fact I regarded it as a fairly new item. I had paid a hefty amount for it and didn’t expect that it would become a useless relic so quickly. I tried another store, only to be told the same thing. No wonder people get into debt.

Whichever way you look at it, consumerism is bad news. Even if we manage to ignore the advertising designed to create a desire in us to buy things, we are compelled to do so, when we can’t repair what we already have. Why can’t a computer that I spent nearly $2,000 on be repaired? Who is making these decisions? I resent it. For one thing, the discarded products end up in landfill. How many mountains of rubbish are we going to keep building at this rate? And more importantly, this desire is seeping so subliminally into our lives, we don’t even know it’s happening.

Pick up a Sunday newspaper and most of it is filled with new stuff to buy: for the kitchen, for your face, for your body, for the bedroom etc. A lot of it is very nice. I find myself thinking that I would like to own that new cushion/set of bowls/armchair/necklace. Restraint is so passe. We tell ourselves we deserve things. ‘I’m worth it,’ I once heard a woman say to justify the money she spent on a piece of jewellery.

What does it mean for us, for our quality of life, for our relationships if we start to measure our worth in monetary terms? I sometimes hesitate to tell my son I can’t afford certain things he asks for- a new X-box game for instance. I ask myself why I hesitate. My parents never hesitated to tell me. My son tells me half jokingly that my attitudes are so 1960s. I don’t like to think of myself as stuck in the past. But then I think of Barry and his anxiety about what to buy his grandchildren and their lack of enthusiasm for his gifts. Contrast that with his own sweet, sharp memories of his grandfather – a man who could only ever afford to buy him lollies. This is not about romanticising poverty.

There’s nothing romantic about being poor. But there is something to be said about the love between Barry’s grandfather and him that is not about things he bought him. Perhaps it’s an idea we can hold onto this Christmas before we go spending money we don’t have on things we can’t afford that will end up in the bin.

* Jeana Vithoulkas is a senior manager at Essential Media Communications and a freelance writer