'Tis the season to sigh when you enter the mall, and especially any store selling items for miniature people, like life-sized Batman figures and car tracks that cannot be laid out without a home addition.

'Tis the season when I return from my errands with a headache, forgetting what I ran out to get in the first place.

'Tis the season to remember that Americans consume far more in toys, clothes and luxury items than any other country. But we deserve it. We work the hardest, or at least more than Canada and Great Britain, according to the Gallup Poll people. Americans work longer hours and take less vacation than our Canadian and British counterparts, meaning we can afford all the stocking stuffers and remote-control matchbox cars.

But does all the consumerism make us happier than other nations? Not so, say a few people I've talked to recently who are striving to live more simply so that "others may simply live."

For example, Chris and Evie Lotze left professional jobs in Washington, having lived all over the world, to buy a farm in West Virginia. Now, instead of cursing at the driver in front of them on their morning commute, they "wake to their inner clocks, have leisurely coffee on the front porch or by the fire and plot mischief for the day," says Evie.

As a former psychologist who trained mental health professionals in the use of creative methods of psychotherapy, she and her husband, a former economist who has studied here and abroad, spend their hours raising Black Angus Beef without hormones or antibiotics on pastures free of herbicides and pesticides.

Two type-A personalities, the Lotzes stay plenty busy with activities that range from restoring a historic house whose front field saw one of the skirmishes of the Civil War to bottle-feeding two angus calves. Then there's the one-third of a mile walk to the mailbox with their border collie and cat.

Why would two successful professionals with lots of initials behind their names chuck the experience and credentials to bottle-feed Willie the Calf?

For the same reason that a friend of my in-laws lives in a 500-square-foot adobe hut with no water and no electricity: for a taste of simplicity and to make choices that can't help but save lives in places most of us only know on maps.

'Tis the season when we in America need to get a grip on our spending habits and ask ourselves what some impoverished children on the other side of the globe might really want for Christmas.

Therese J. Borchard is a columnist with Catholic News Service.