The memory of it flashes up in my mind exactly like a photo, one of the old square ones with rounded edges and colours which somehow look faded and strong at the same time. An Instagram you could hold in your hand, if you will. I was maybe five years old, and standing with my mother who, as mothers seem to do when you’re that age, was having an interminably long and gossipy chat with a friend she’d met in the street. We were outside the newsagent’s shop in Nairn, and it was cold. And dark. I had tuned out of whatever grown-up conversation was going on, and craned my neck to look up at the town clock. The street was filled with decorations: trees and stars, and lights, blues, reds and greens, and the clock was similarly bedecked. It was five o’clock on the twenty-first of December, and I heard my mother’s friend say how much I must have been looking forward to Christmas, and thought just how right she was.

 

I’ve always loved Christmas. Anyone who kindly read my words in this magazine back in the summer may remember what I wrote about the joys of darker, colder weather (or, more accurately, the lack of joy I find in stifling summer warmth). Christmas for me couldn’t be less about religion (my views on which make Richard Dawkins sound like The Pope) or more about everything else: it’s a towering celebration of winter itself, a paean to presents, a tribe to tat, to fun, friends and family - and something that can never start too soon.

 

It’s fashionable to complain that the paraphernalia of the festive season increasingly appears at the wrong time of year. Shops putting trees up in October, restaurants advertising Christmas office lunches in September, supermarkets stocking up on selection boxes and tinsel before Halloween is even out of the way. I concur with those complaints - but only because I think it all happens too late. I’d have everything up in April.

 

Once on a radio trip to Boston, I borrowed a car from the very lovely local tourist board, and remained in the states with a colleague for a few days, driving up to and staying with a friend in Nashua, New Hampshire. While in Boston, I’d seen a small store called The Christmas Dove in one of the malls. My long suffering colleague patiently waited while I walked around, like some kind of kid in some kind of shop. Her face only really fell when I picked up a leaflet advertising their twenty-five room superstore in the town of Barrington, a mere 90 minute drive from where we would be staying. And so two days later, I was to be found folding down the rear two rows of seats in our Dodge people carrier, in order to fit in all of the twinkling, flashing, singing festive tat I’d just bought from the somewhat surprised shop owner, who not unreasonably thought on this June afternoon that all her Christmases had come at once.

 

Christmas decorations act like a kind of diary. Each December, when they come out of storage (my partner has a strict rule that nothing can so do until twelve days before the big day, as much I suspect for my sake as his), they acquire new pieces bought during the year, and with them, the memories of their purchase. A ceramic snow-covered church candle holder from Iceland, a battery powered LED tree from Chicago, a bauble or two bought at a 90% discount in Harrod’s in February. It’s all there. Many a happy October day has been spent with my friend Lyndsay (the editor of this magazine and a fellow Festi-phile), anticipating the launch of the Christmas shop out at Dobbie’s Garden Centre. If you’re reading this Lyndsay, and one imagines as editor that you are, we are woefully overdue for that this year. And I think it’s my turn to pay for lunch.

 

Anyway, I may have digressed a little. As I write this, I have one mental eye on all my boxes, stacked up in the store room. I’m wondering if the goblins have been yet; the ones that climb into the cases and tie up all the cables for the lighting into completely impenetrable constrictor knots. I’m also telling myself that I have enough of every conceivable type of tat: villages that light up, Santas that sing while on motorbikes, trees of every type, shape and construction. And yet it never quite seems that there is enough, because those who seek to arrange their decorations tastefully are those who miss the point most spectacularly of all: everything should collide in a riot of colour, sound and spectacle. Nothing else feels like Christmas, because nothing else looks like the high street in a small Highland town through the eyes of a five-year old.