The consumer aspects of the Christmas season affect everyone, even those who do not celebrate the holiday. With this in mind, our own small gift is a selection of websites focusing on the history of (Christmas) shopping:
Histocrats in the Classroom has a feature on "Gilded Age Christmas Shopping"
Backstory Radio offers "Counter Culture: A History of Shopping" (with commentary from, among others, Elaine Abelson, Louis Hyman, and T. H. Breen)
"The Commercial Christmas," from BBC History Magazine
Slate, explaining that Christmas shopping season has started "early" since Victorian times
"An Economist Goes Christmas Shopping," from the New York Times, by Josh Barro, son of Harvard economist Robert Barro, and
"If Economists Wrote Christmas Cards," from The Atlantic (and the poll about gift-giving on which the piece is based)
Slate, again, with "The Original War on Christmas" and the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving