CHRISTMAS is coming and I can’t muster up any enthusiasm.

Maybe that’s because it started in summer. At work, I received press releases about Christmas as early as June and it was not long after the schools went back that festive goods began appearing in the shops.

I heard my first Christmas song in a shop just after Halloween. I can’t recall which song it was, but I was aware of its festive jollity as soon as I entered and dragged my husband from the car to witness it.

November seems to have overtaken December as the true beginning of Christmas. When I was a child you did not see decorations or Christmas trees before December, and even then it was mid-month. Now they start going up from November 1.

Shops stock Christmas stuff from very early on - sometimes it sits side by side with Halloween masks.

In mid-December my dad used to perform his annual ritual of walking to a neighbouring village to buy our tree and carry it home on his back. There were always loads of trees to choose from, right up to Christmas.

Now people clamour to get their trees from December 1, and they are often sold out by the middle of the month. I work part-time in a farm shop, which sells Christmas trees, and people began asking for them as early as mid-November.

People can’t wait to put up their decorations either. Over the past few weeks I have seen so many homes adorned with festive shimmer that I’m sick of the sight it. Some people leave their lights up all year round - on the bus to work I pass two homes which never take down them down. There are few sights more depressing than a santa-shaped string of bulbs on the wall of a house in mid-July.

Christmas cards appear in the shops from October half-term which is far too premature. I can’t even bring myself to look at them before December.

When I was young I knew Christmas was almost here when the toy and perfume adverts appeared. Now they are on for weeks. I am fed up with watching beautiful people embracing on Manhattan rooftops, doused in some ridiculously expensive scent.

It is also not unusual nowadays for people to have their Christmas shopping all wrapped up by October. A friend who works for a high street store told me that this year they had so many unsold Christmas goods that their January sale began in mid-December. Things were so quiet at the tills that many of the Christmas temps they recruited to cope with the expected rush had to look for things to do.

It’s too much, too soon. Our eagerness to get stuck into Christmas waters down the excitement that used to precede it. Some people love Christmas, others hate it, but whatever people’s opinions, it is a special, different, time of year. Or it was. Now it goes on for so long that that feeling is lost.

I suppose you could argue that if Christmas starts in October it at least gives you time to get organised, but do we really need three months to plan for two days? It is not as if we are all having to arrange huge society weddings - it’s a couple of family meals for heaven’s sake, like Sunday lunch with a few extra trimmings and crackers.

And talking of crackers, when are the manufacturers going to put something a little different inside? Every year it’s the same - tweezers, tiny packs of playing cards, metal book marks and, bizarrely, sets of plastic measuring spoons.

Still, it will all be over soon, and we can start planning for next year. There’s nothing like the January sales - which now start on Boxing Day - for Christmas gifts.

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