Mark Andrews: Christmas shouldn't be a year-long, painful slog

Yes, you can tell it's December when the advertising agencies gear up for the festive season with a fresh raft of saccharine-fueled adverts dedicated to finding fresh ways of parting us from our hard-earned.

We've had Ant and Dec's gingerbread men, Asda's giant snowmen, not to mention the Tesco 'forever young' campaign. And don't get me started on that ghastly M&S fairytale campaign.

Me, cynical? Perish the thought.

But the other sign of us making our way into winter is that whenever grumpy curmudgeons like me start complaining about it being too early for Christmas adverts, somebody will triumphantly pipe up, "I finished all my Christmas shopping in September."

And then, pausing briefly in anticipation of a round of applause, they continue: "I did it all online."

Well I'm sorry, but to me, the prospect of spending the summer months tapping away at a computer screen is not so much a great feat of forward planning. Rather, it makes me feel just a teeny bit sad.

Maybe its because, as a child, most my family's birthdays fell towards the end of the year, I have always felt there to be something rather unseemly about the haste with which people start planning for Christmas.

Of course, some of the shop-early-for-Christmas brigade do so out of a child-like impatience that makes it unbearable to wait another four months before the festive season arrives. In the same way that many people will spend New Year's Day wading through the travel brochures, impatiently contemplating their summer holidays.

But these days we even have consumer experts, such as the otherwise brilliant Martin Lewis, telling us that the best time to start planning for Christmas is in January?

What? Now I understand the financial arguments. Fail to plan, plan to fail and all that. And if eight years studying economics taught me one thing, it is that life is essentially one very long series of business transactions.

While New Age types – you know, people who go to work in rimless glasses and turtle-neck sweaters – love to talk about warm, fuzzy concepts like quality of life and emotional well-being, the reality is almost everything we do is governed by a simple cost-benefit analysis – we look at the resources at our disposal, and then decide how best to deploy those said resources.

It is common sense then that you will seek to buy at the bottom of the market, when supply exceeds demand – or when they cannot flippin' give it away, in economist's parlance.

Yet, and yet . . . it's just not right, is it? Christmas should surely be the one time of the year when we take a break from economics, when our minds are focused on things other than wanton materialism.

Because if you think of Christmas in such coldly logical terms, then surely the whole idea of giving presents is itself a little irrational. From a purely economic point of view, how can you justify a system of barter where consumers exchange goods that they have chosen for ones they haven't?

The danger is, that if you spend all year planning your Christmas with such military precision, you end up sapping all the meaning and joy out of the festivities.

No, I'll keep Christmas my way, as somebody once said. That means disregarding all my usual rules of logic, and putting it to the back of my mind until the week before.

Then I will join all the hordes of other like-minded shoppers, in a frantic last-minute race against the clock, culminating in a row with a store security guard minutes before closing time on Christmas Eve.