My kids are now in their mid-late teens and I don't have a single regret about their Advent or Christmas Eve boxes. I have extremely happy memories of coming home from the Advent service at church each year to find a basket on the doorstep, glowing with fairy lights with a letter inside from the Christmas Elf telling us all about what she'd been up to that year. We would hang the advent calendar up and take out the first figure, light the candle for the first Sunday of Advent, set up the Nativity set so that Mary and Joseph could start their journey, hang paper stars in the window, sprinkle a few drops of scented oil on the radiator pot pourri bag and eat lebkuchen. At bedtime, we could choose a book. Some of them (The Box of Delights, The Dark is Rising, The Story of Holly and Ivy, The Jolly Christmas Postman) were books from my own childhood. Others like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and A Boy called Christmas were I bought, but which were read for several years.
Everything was a one-off purchase which got years' worth of use apart from the lebkuchen, candy canes, mulled wine, candles and I think over the past 15 years or so I've gone through 3 or 4 bottles of White Company Winter scented oil.
I had very little money when my children were little. We couldn't afford mindless consumption. But we could choose to make ordinary everyday affordable things feel special, and that's what the boxes were all about.
And I know people who had even less money who did have advent boxes full of pound shop bargains, and those boxes also brought joy to the kids and the parents, because when you have nothing one of the very worst things is never being able to be generous or extravagant, and a box of cheap treats allows people to do just that in a small way at a time when things are often really stressful. That extra tenner won't buy a big ticket to, but will give a day of fun for less than the bus fare for a walk in the woods or hot chocolate and a biscuit in a cafe.