Stuck for a gift? Try a token of affection instead...

THIS Christmas I am seriously considering early retirement. Not from my job, obviously. As I write, Scottish Finance Secretary Derek Mackay is still on his feet delivering the Budget.

I wish he would sit down. It is hardly conducive to thoughts of cashing in the chips and road testing ride-on lawn mowers.

No, it is from Christmas itself that I seek some form of golden handshake – a negotiated settlement freeing me up to pursue other interests in November and December.

Clearly this is not a decision to be taken lightly. Nothing excites emotions like Christmas does. Few are the family niggles resistant to rapid expansion when the halls are decked with boughs of holly. I have little doubt it is for this reason alone that, traditionally, only octogenarians and older ever secure halfway decent yuletide retirement packages.

But I would like to at least open talks about scaling back my festive commitments somewhat earlier – 30 or 40 years earlier, say – and let me begin by explaining the reasons.

I am all Christmassed out. For years I have struggled on, fooling myself I still have it in me to brave the perfume counters, ladieswear sections and jewellery displays of our rammed high streets. But I really don’t.

Christmas shopping-wise, I am washed up. A sorry husk of the parcel-laden customer who used to get the whole thing done on one immaculately executed Saturday afternoon. Let me go quietly while I still have some dignity. Please? Don’t make me go back out there again.

At this stage in our negotiation I can already hear your counter. Good heavens, man. You don’t mean to say that, all those years, you have actually been doing your Christmas shopping at the shops? No wonder you’re running on empty. Now, we’re going to log onto our computers – and prepare for a shock.

Confident

But, of course, online shopping on sites such as Amazon creates as many problems as it solves and even if you tell me it doesn’t, we are fast approaching that time when it will be too late to be confident of delivery in time for Christmas.

Which puts us right back on the high street – most likely in the smells shop which chucks a few wee bottles in a box full of tissue paper and calls it £50.

Even before we reach the preChristmas delivery deadline, however, there are lots of reasons why online shopping provides no effective sanctuary from the horrors of the traditional town centre method.

Foremost among them is the fact many of our relatives are simply not programmed to ask for presents which are searchable on Amazon.

Go on, see what happens when you search for ‘a nice top, maybe’. For good measure, try ‘a nice scarf’ or ‘a nice plant’.

No, these are suggestions designed to propel the giver into actual shops to consider in befuddlement what a nice top or a nice scarf means to the prospective recipient.

And these are the kinds of energy sapping expeditions which drive middle-aged Scots in employment headlong into Christmas burn-out territory.

I am not just making this up because I haven’t done my Christmas shopping yet. There is science to support me.

A survey by PharmacyOutlet. co.uk suggests 30 per cent of UK adults – 15.5million people – dread the Christmas and New Year period and the strains that it puts on their physical and mental health.

Right up there with the chief contributors to these increased stress levels is the pressure of buying presents for people we love they actually quite like.

Anxiety here is exacerbated by the fact we attend more social functions in December, which means we have less time to get the job done and less money to do it with. And we have a hangover.

You want more science? Three in five feel at their least healthy during the Christmas period due to these burdens and one in six says this is the time when they get least sleep.

So I say again, can we at least talk about a Christmas early retirement plan?

Heaven knows I have put in a decent shift. Four decades now. And I am afraid that, if I must give more business to shops which I enter but once a year simply to fulfil contractual Christmas obligations, I will pick up any old thing and say ‘that’ll do – it’ll just go in a cupboard anyway’.

Expenditure

I really would rather give a gift the recipient found in some small way worth having.

Here, then, is my proposal for reining in the workload, stress and needless expenditure on items which just will moulder in storage. We exchange vouchers instead. Yes, that’s right. You give me a gift voucher for £50 and I give you a voucher for the same amount back. I know it sounds silly but, heigh-ho, lots about Christmas is silly.

This way, when you hit on an idea for something you want rather more specific than a nice top, you will have free readies with which to make it yours. Similarly, you will not give me books which I have little interest in reading or which you gave me last year like that Bob Dylan one I’d bought for myself when it first came out anyway.

What I am saying is many of us lead busy lives and now that Mr Mackay has finally taken his seat again, even more financially straitened ones too.

Wouldn’t Christmas be a lot easier if we knew we were hitting the bullseye every time we bought a present? Doesn’t it take a weight off our shoulders knowing the free money winging its way to our loved one will not be shoved in a drawer?

Yes, I appreciate there is something not very Christmassy about a collection of gift tokens under the tree. But we still have crackers to pull. We can still put on our paper hats.

Nor, come to think of it, could Christmas truly be Christmas without the wonder in children’s eyes as they gaze ravenously upon their Santa sacks stuffed with parcels and the belief that somehow this lot came down the chimney.

Only the most precociously calculating could conjure similar wonder while reading a figure next to a pound sign.

But – I merely put it out there to take a temperature reading – isn’t it time the rest of us grew up? Can’t we even consider semi-retirement? No? All right then, I’ll do it this weekend.