Balancing Christmas Me-ism and Christian Faith

If you are a Christian family, then Christmas is SUPPOSED to be about celebrating the birth of Christ. I LOVE what my pastor recently said... "It's not YOUR birthday!" So how do we balance the pressures of "my FRIENDS are getting blah blah blah" while trying to teach our kids to keep the focus where it is supposed to be?
 
This is something that we have struggled with greatly in our family. Our twins' birthday is December 22. Couple that with the fact that we live far away from family members, but are usually back in Alabama around this date, it means that whole week our kids are showered with gifts. Most years, our children receive very little from us or "Santa" due to the sheer volume of stuff they receive from the rest of the family members. But even with our "simple" approach, it seems that materialistic force has still affected us.
 
My son has made several comments over the last few weeks that showed me that the highlight of his Christmas season is GETTING STUFF!!  ugh! So now I am trying to find all those teachable moments to reinforce that gifts are not the most important part. Of course, I do remember being a child and that sheer excitement of "what will I get??" myself. I know it is normal to feel this, but at the same time, aren't we supposed to be counter-culture?
 
I sure don't want to make my son feel guilty for enjoying gifts and have him associate the Christian faith with that guilt. So we will continue along this tightrope of give and take while we take advantage of those teachable moments to remember the REASON. I think we'll even try to create more of those teachable moments by doing a family focus on advent devotions and look for ways to reach out and give to others as a family.
 
What is it like for your family? What do you do to help keep this balance?