Christmas may come too early, but its gaudiness is just glorious

What an awful time of year. Christmas is on the horizon and, as usual, I’m fuming. Don’t get me wrong – I adore the jollity and abundance, but the C word should not be used in polite society before the start of December.

I don’t like to see a tree before the middle of the month. I do my shopping on Christmas Eve. But oh dear, the merrymakers have jumped the gun. The decorations are up in the Strand, department stores are ablaze with lights. We seem to have been at it for weeks.

There will be more debates to come. Celebration can be a battleground. Every family has its own ideas – as, for example, when to get the tree. This can be a source of tension in early married life, when an early-tree groom weds a late-tree bride. In our family, the matter is still disputed every year, after more than three decades of marriage – and made worse by the fact (don’t ask why) we have two trees. They’re real trees. Some people have artificial ones. We real-trees tend to look on them with pity. We can’t help it.

And here is the nub of the matter. Nothing says so much about a family as its Christmas decorations. Perhaps it’s that old snobbery – a question of breeding. For our reactions to the season – habits, expectations – are conditioned by childhood. We want to reproduce the excitement of our early years.

That’s why it is the new that most risks being naff. Look at the box-fresh Trump White House display, just unveiled. At the Aslet feast we bring out the same baubles every year, greeting each one as an old friend – even, I regret to say, the Father Christmas lavatory seat cover. My favourite baubles were bought on a visit to Cracow – but they were so delicate, they broke. Never mind: more are added to the motley assortment every year. By the inflationary rule that governs our household, you can only add to the rituals, never take away.

I know there are some people who reject the whole fairylight-festooned smugfest, with incitements to overindulgence and material excess – going to some far-flung country to avoid it. To the rest of us, it’s not just important but personal. For once in the year, this emotionally inarticulate nation puts its inner-self on display – brightly.

It is horribly revealing. You may be a Duke, with real candles on the tree and a footman standing by with a bucket of water. Or you may smother everything beneath (despised in some quarters) multicoloured tinsel. This being Britain, class will out. White lights, coloured lights, flashing lights, those over-bright LED ones – whatever choice you make will be a statement of social standing.

Well, I refuse to be put off. Our house will be lit up to the max. I don’t say we’ll go as far as those ho-hohouses that have reindeers on roof and illuminated nativity scenes. I once interviewed the owner of one outside Gloucester. As well as a Victorian fairground scene, a collection of drunken elves making presents and, for some reason, the Owl and the Pussycat in their boat, he had a snowflake machine (using carpet shampoo) and a dancing snowman sung Deck the Halls. Glorious. And preferable, I’d say, to the sort of tastefulness favoured in SW1. Gaudy derives from the Latin word for joy. Gaudiness is next to godliness at Christmas.