Sandra Bullock's Kids Are Only Getting '3 Small Gifts' This Christmas — Here's Why

Sandra Bullock wants her kids to keep the holidays in perspective.

On Today, the actress, 54, shared that for her son Louis, 8, and her daughter Laila, 6, “Christmas is three small gifts” this December.

Bullock explained that Christmas at her abode is normally “really, really overdone because I overdo it, and then I panic that I didn’t do enough, and then I get more, and then everyone else has overdone it.”

“But this year we just stopped,” she shared. “We just stopped because there’s so much happening in the world where people don’t have anything. And we said, ‘Why don’t we just make this about other people?’ And they were amazing about it.”

Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Parents newsletter.

In 2015, before her first Christmas with both Louis and Laila at home, Bullock opened up to PEOPLE about her funny holiday tradition. “Usually I dress as Santa and sneak outside so that there is a Santa sighting in the dark Christmas Eve,” she said.

“But Louis is onto me that I always have to ‘walk the dog’ when the family has their sighting,” Bullock continued. “So I ordered the XL Santa suit this year and will pass the torch to my brother-in-law so I may watch Laila see him for the first time.”

In 2011, Bullock revealed her unusual Christmas dinner habit on The Tonight Show. “Since my mother passed, we break the law because we have to manage to smuggle German sausages into the country, and apparently bringing meats across the waters is against the law,” she said.

Bullock’s new role in Bird Box is not quite as cozy as her holiday seasons of past have been. Alongside Sarah Paulson, she stars in the apocalyptic thriller about people who will witness their worst fears if they remove their blindfolds.

“Oddly, this came about when my kids said, ‘Why don’t you make something for us?’ ” Bullock shared on Today. “I now realize they were talking about animated or Marvel.”

RELATED VIDEO: Sandra Bullock On The Joy Of Raising Siblings: ‘There Are Moments They Want To Kill Each Other’

“Lou was very interested in what everyone’s worst fear was,” Bullock recalled of her kids’ time on the set. “He would go around to the actors saying, ‘What is your worst fear?’ He knew what mine was. Mine was anything happening to them. I said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you how dark I go.’ But I said, ‘Anything that happens to you.’ ”

“I think the worst thoughts all day. They know I worry all the time,” she added. “All the time. 24/7.”