I don't like to parent with fear, anger and threats like that in my bag of tricks.
that's it in a nutshell for me as well.

In our house we have tangible discussions about not so awesome behaviour.

I could never ever cancel christmas. it is, for us, a time of immense joy, that sometimes brief moment to forget the horrors of the world, the hardships of the year and just celebrate as a family. Reading that article that Tinks posted was really disturbing...i just want to run in and hug my girls after reading that! how can you strip the joy away from those children when it might be one of the most important moments for a child to actually feel loved and appreciated in a time when, as the parents mentioned: it was all rush rush rush. gosh, it just makes me feel quite sad.

If my child turned around after I said that i was going to 'tell santa' not to come...well, TBH, i would probably burst out laughing and grab my kid in a big bear hug and tell them, that no, never would they miss out on christmas. I would see it as a pretty good opportunity to discuss that although santa will still come, and christmas will still arrive, that you (the mum) would reckon that it would be a MUCH better and heaps more fun christmas if they were not so mean to eachother/helped out more etc. i am quite open with DD1 (6yrs) in that I tell her if she is being a bit rotten that we really want to have a fabulous time, but that she might want to consider how her behaviour might make that hard...it then also leads into (i have found) positive discussions about how she is feeling and why and allows for her to sometimes focus on what is that is bugging her and making her cross/moody/mean.