Fed up with doing Christmas their way? It's time to "renegotiate" your family Christmas to find your "authentic" rituals.

University boffins are studying shoppers who want to enjoy a "more authentic Christmas" by resisting yuletide excess.

Dr Michael Lee from the University of Auckland studies "anti-consumption" and forms of human resistance to mad consumerism.

Lee and one of his students, Ilaisaane Fifita✓, studied resistance to gift giving, which has led to a paper called: "All I want for Christmas is the real thing."

Its conclusion says: "Although participants still celebrate Christmas, they resist giving gifts in order to avoid social obligations, minimise stress, and oppose the materialism and consumerism they associate with the cultural norm of gift-giving during Christmas."

Increasing pressure to give gifts was leading to an "inauthentic Christmas experience" at odds with the spiritual meaning of Christmas. None of the wise men expected anything back for the gifts they gave Jesus, Lee and Fifita noted.

The financial stress that Christmas puts on families - around a quarter told Mastercard researchers they expected to be financially stressed this Christmas - also fuelled Christmas push-back.

"Financial, emotional, and time stress also leads to inauthenticity, since stress contradicts another core aspect of Christmas, which is the belief the occasion should be a peaceful and joyful time spent with family," Lee and Fifita found.

Lee believes many people are quietly resisting aspects of Christmas. "I think a lot of people approach it in different ways," he said. "People will come up with their own rituals, if they are particularly disgusted about the amounts of consumption they see in the festive season."

A quarter of people in Marstercard's survey said they were dialling back on their spending this year. Four in ten planned to give between one and five gifts. One in 20 were giving nothing.

Not all Christmas gifting resistance is driven by the desire for an authentic Christmas, Lee said. Some refuse to buy anything until the Boxing Day sales. Others showed their resistance to consumerism by doing things like buying a goat for a village in Africa as a gift for a loved one, instead of heading down to The Warehouse.

Juergen Gnoth, a consumer behaviour expert from the University of Otago, sees Christmas as a manifestation of a universal tendency for societies. "Every society tends to create rites and rituals to create meaning and normalcy and predictability," he said.

But, he added, never before have people been so free to resist those societal norms.

Ours was a time of personal liberty to express our individuality, which had its genesis in the industrialisation and urbanisation of Europe, which saw many of our forbears move out of tight-knit rural communities and forced to fend for themselves, Gnoth said.

But finding your authentic Christmas is tough, even in a hot, Southern hemisphere country which has rejected some of the cold Northern hemisphere Christmas rituals.

Humankind has always had festivals of conspicuously excessive consumption, said Lee. Gnoth said some believed people were genetically pre-disposed to throw themselves into those festivals. The idea is this "evolved for the simple reason that if you become a follower it is easier for you to survive, and for your progeny to survive", Gnoth said.

Christmas also had a force produced by its repetition in our lives, he said, though that repetition is something that also leads many to reassess the way they celebrate it.

Gnoth said: "The pure copy of certain behaviours over time will lose its magic, so every family should renegotiate their Christmas."

Families "know" what Christmas should be, Gnoth said. The question becomes which of the "paraphernalia" they are able to do without.

It's a very personal choice. Christmas in the Gnoth household is a nod to both the German tradition of celebrating Christmas on its eve, and the New Zealand tradition of doing it on the 25th.