Start shopping in August and join me in joyful smugness with Christmas all wrapped up

LET’S get this over with: I have completed all my Christmas shopping. Well, maybe not quite all – there are a couple more teensy bits I need to pick up, and I will need to get some festive food closer to the time. But most of my gifts were stuffed in my wardrobe by December 1, and they are now also largely wrapped and labelled. The same was true last year, and the year before that. You hate me for it, don’ t you? Don’t feel bad about your resentful feelings. I am resigned to them. I suspect that most Irish people feel this way. This degree of festive organisation is practically an insult to our usual concept of the Irish character, which can probably be summarised as devil-may-care, go-with-the-flow, buy-it-all-at-the-last-minute-in-a-crazy-end-of-days-splurge.

But hey, this is how I roll. Also I do have friends in this (I just don’t happen to know many of them). There are several online shops that specialise in Christmas shopping all year round, and actual bricks and mortar shops in the US. The marketing firm Mediacom did a survey recently of Irish shopping habits and found that – despite our whole blithe couldn’t-be-arsed Paddy routine – 56pc of us begin buying gifts at least two or three months before Christmas, with women more likely than men to start shopping early. Another survey said 76pc of people aimed to be done with Christmas shopping by December (it didn’t specify if they achieved the aim though, which might be the more telling statistic).

Men – as many of us will be aware – have been deemed to be more likely to leave Christmas shopping until the last minute rush, with 13pc starting their shopping the week before Christmas, compared to 5pc of females. The numbers sound on the low side to me, given the level of mass, and largely male, frenzy I have observed on Grafton Street on Christmas Eve, but perhaps Dubliners are especially tardy.

In any case, when Dublin’s Brown Thomas opened its Christmas shop in August this year, it seemed I was alone (though I can’t have been wholly so) among my colleagues and friends, in openly taking the view it was quite a good thing that BTs had decided to extend the Christmas run-up to a rather generous 130 days.

Within 24 hours I was begging my daughter to come take a look.

“We don’t have to buy anything,” I found myself wheedling with her in a rare reversal of the positions of our usual retail-theme conversations. “I just want to check it out.”

“It is August, mother,” she responded. “We are not going Christmas shopping in August.”

So I went to the Christmas shop on my own. The next time it came up in conversation, I nodded along with the general sense of outrage at the commercial is at ion of Christmas, secure in the knowledge that I had stolen a march on them all in terms of acquiring some very fancy looking Christmas tree baubles for the 2017 festivities (I buy three or four posh ones every year, in case you are interested: thus nothing on my tree matches anything else).

IT had finally dawned on me that the fact I was positively excited by the notion of Christmas shopping beginning before Halloween was something nobody else needed – or indeed, probably wanted – to know.

With a mere nine days to go to the Big Day, the disparity between my own approach to Christmas and that of practically everyone else I

know is becoming more apparent.

I ran into some neighbours on Saturday who were heading to town to pick up some gifts.

How are you getting on, they asked. Caught on the hop, I stupidly confessed I was going to lunch with friends because my Christmas shopping – as you now also know – was already done. After a short pause in which expressions of undiluted hate flashed across their normally polite faces, they smiled and wished me well, before proceeding to probably curse me for the rest of the day.

My family members, meanwhile, have taken to moaning that they have “nothing done” and asking me for suggestions for gifts for different individuals, on the grounds that (deliberately flatteringly), “you are so good at this kind of thing”.

I am thus far refusing to take their manipulative bait. The beauty of being an early shopper is that it leaves you free in December to do things that actually are fun, like meeting your friends and admiring the city lights.

It is not about freeing up my time to worry about anyone else’s Christmas list, much less joining a mid-December queue for a perfume and skin cream set for someone else’s aunt.

Bah hum bug to that. Next year, get organised.

With a mere nine days until the Big Day, the disparity between my approach and that of practically everyone else is more apparent