Fear not, said he (lest mighty dread has seized your troubled mind) I'm not about to get all saucy, I refer in fact to the Christmas feeling. However, since I'm not aware of any song with the lyrics "I don't feel at all Christmassy this year woo-woo", and being brazenly shameless when it comes to the use of misleading and unrepresentative column titles, I settled for the above snippet from the Righteous Brothers classic. Before I leave it behind, I think I'm right in saying that it was the song was guaranteed to get Rebecca Howe (from "Cheers") in the mood for lurve, so perhaps I am getting just a little bit saucy after all. And before moving on, let me remind you that Andrew's Columns are typed before a live studio audience.

But anyway, the feelin' that I appear to be lackin' is the sense of it being Christmas in little under three weeks time. Obviously I know that it is: the calendar, the shelves of every shop in town, the housefronts of half the village (although not Curnow Towers) all remind me on a daily basis that the 25th December is almost here again. I know it, I just don't have any sense of excitement about it. As a rule I usually get something of a Christmassy tingle (oo-er missus) around about October, which then continues unabated until the day itself; but this year, so far at least, there's nothing at all. To make it worse, I can honestly say that we have not as yet bought a single Christmas present. And, do you know, not only am I not panicking about it, I feel an eerie, even ominous, sense of calm about it all. I daresay that the time will soon come (for buying presents that is, not panicking) but I don't currently feel any great need for urgency or rush. It's all very odd, and even though we're never the most organised of families when it comes to arrangements for the Big Day, by this point in December there are normally presents safely hidden in wardrobes and drawers.

Of course, some people do their Christmas shopping all year round rather than leave it to the last minute. My mother-in-law is one such - she bought some very cheap wrapping paper in the January sales this year, something like a four metre roll for a pound. Unfortunately, when she went looking for it during November (well, when she sent my father-in-law looking for it) she couldn't remember where they'd squirreled it away, and so she's had to buy some more. Obviously, being a very close-knit family, we didn't laugh about it. To her face. It's not just wrapping paper though, she seems to be forever stocking up on presents during the year. Maybe it's just me, but I never really have the enthusiasm for a conversation during July that begins with, "I got this for so-and-so for Christmas..." The lady I share the office with at work also, apparently, buys cards and presents and the like all year round, so it's not just a character flaw in Mrs C's mother.

Personally, I don't think I could ever bring myself to be forever on Christmas-alert, for a variety of reasons. The first is simply that in January the last thing I want to think about is how far away next Christmas is - it's a depressing enough month as it is, without thinking about something that's a full twelve months away. Another reason is the old sense of tempting fate. I would be very wary of storing away something in February that would make an ideal present for cousin Billy-Bob, for fear that old Billy-Bob would get himself run over by a bus during the Summer. Not only would it be a dreadful tragedy, but it would be an awful waste of money wouldn't it...

But the third, and probably main, reason is that somehow doing Christmas shopping at any time before, say, October at the earliest, seems just plain.... wrong. I can't really explain in what sense it's wrong - it's not as simple as saying that you should wait until you get 'a Christmassy tingle' because as this year plainly demonstrates I'm not a-tingling yet, but panic or no panic I'm going to go and buy some presents within the next week or two. For want of a more cogent description, I suppose it's the same sort of 'wrongness' that I experienced while watching a recent TV ad for Tesco.

The advert in question is the one with the voiceover by Bruce Forsyth, comparing the box of crackers for £19.96 and the Tesco's box for 96p. Until we see the price, the voiceover states: "One is obviously more attractive than the other", but once the relative prices pop up old Uncle Brucie gives us the punchline: "Then again..." Now, while I agree that it's absurd to pay twenty pounds for half a dozen crackers, what exactly is the advert saying? Isn't the gist of it, "Our crackers are rubbish - but they're cheap rubbish"? I think why the advert niggles at me is because it's like a schoolchild who has almost grasped some new concept, but who can't quite follow it through to the logical conclusion. Or, to get back to Brucie, if you're planning to buy crackers that are blatantly cheap rubbish... WHY BUY THEM AT ALL?

What seems like years ago, one of these 'ere columns referred to the way that children draw people - essentially, as long as all the elements are included (two eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc) kids seem to assume that the picture will look just right. It's as absurd a thought as the assertion that if I stick two eggs, a bag of flour and some margarine into the cooker I will end up with a cake. And it seems to me that this is the direction Christmas is heading in. It's like there's a checklist of things - one of which is crackers, so any old rubbish will do as long as that item can be ticked off the list.

I think, maybe, what I'm grasping for, is that it's yet another step away from 'the true meaning of Christmas'. Actually, I suppose I ought to qualify that - technically speaking, the 'true' meaning of Christmas is either a celebration of the birth of Christ, or an even older pagan festival which was hijacked by these upstart Christians. But what I actually mean here by the 'true' meaning (and as it's nearly Christmas I'm going to allow myself a yuletide Adams, and say that this is some strange usage of the word true that you haven't previously been aware of) is the sense of sending cards or giving presents to people not because they're another item to be ticked off the list, but because you want to, and because the people are important to you. What's the expression - 'Do it like you mean it'? Perhaps a neater way to summarise what I'm trying to get at is to say that the 'true' meaning is the opposite of the over-commercialisation of Christmas that everybody moans about.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to lay claim to being some deeply spiritual being, rising above the sundry materialistic trappings of Christmas to ponder over its deeper meanings, far from it. And like the next man, or woman, or child (probably child) I will be rather happy if I get some nice things for Christmas (incidentally, if Mrs C should be reading this, the "Lost in Time" DVD set is very reasonable, or the complete boxset of "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin", or some books, CDs, etc, etc) but I genuinely wouldn't spend the day depressed if I don't. Last year my daughter got me three friction-drive Daleks, small, cheap little things, and although I got a great many other things which I greatly liked, I would have been happy with just the Daleks. (Incidentally, I still rate them as one of the great all-purpose gifts of our time - you can use them to entertain small children, to bemuse cats, as a talking point with visitors, to re-enact great moments from Doctor Who... If you're drunk enough, you can even race them.)

I think, having spent most of this column (and indeed a great deal of the 21st Century) floundering, what ultimately I'm getting at is the sense that there should be more thought behind our Christmas. If you want to have crackers, then fine, but get some that are at least halfway decent, or alternatively wake up and smell the turkey, and just don't bother. I really don't see the point in buying something in March that "will do for Auntie Doris" - it's just something to tick off the list. Wouldn't it be better to ask yourself, "what would Auntie Doris like?" a bit nearer the time and go on from there.

I suppose we live in a fast, flashy, overwhelming, overpowering world, and just as some people seem to have big weddings they can't afford, because, well just because it's what you're supposed to do (another checklist exercise, you see?) so our Christmases are in danger of becoming similarly empty and formulaic, and from there it's not much of a leap to them becoming pointless. Perhaps we need to just take a step back. If Christmas is primarily, as the ad guys and overzealous mothers-in-law would have us believe, for the children, maybe we should take a leaf out of their books - so when you pick up the cheapest crackers you can find, just take a moment to ask... Why?

Tune in next week, folks, and Ebenezer Curnow will tell you all about the Christmas plans of his daughter the Buddhist...