The Advent countdown has begun - standby for Christmas.

1. Assess what you need to do for Christmas – seek out the presents you have bought during the year and the ones you bought the previous year and forgot about. Decide you don’t like any of them.

2. Write the first of the lists that will cause you stress for the next three weeks. Tick off everything that is already ordered or bought for the festivities. Discover you haven’t done anything.

3. In the spirit of Christmas, put tinsel around your computer screen

4. In the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge, rip tinsel off computer screen because it’s getting on your nerves.

5. Decide not to send cards; maybe just a few... decide you will send Christmas cards.

6. Buy something really nice for a friend... and keep it for yourself.

7. Spend all day grumpy after writing 81 cards.

8. Have no idea what to give people with no ready supplies of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

9. Get Christmas editions of TV magazines – same old, same old.

10. Stand at the bottom of the loft ladder while husband passes down boxes of baubles.

11. Only 14 sleeps till Christmas.

12. Avoid Christmas cookery programmes on TV. You know you won’t cook anything different.

13. Wrap some presents and realise you have 20 things for mum and two for dad.

14. Write a couple of lists.

15. Obsess about sell-by dates – buy nothing dated before December 26.

16. Watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol, feeling warm and fuzzy... or is it the cranberry gin?

17. Why did you buy all those tins of chocolates and eat them?

18. Feel a bit sick

19. Go shopping and fail to find jam swiss roll for sherry trifle.

20. Make a sponge – now you’re all behind with the preparations.

21. Husband admits he’s bought 48 Christmas crackers: “But they were half price.”

22. Nearly finish wrapping presents but run out of Sellotape.

23. Get a card from someone to whom you didn’t send one...

24. So much to do... don’t know where to start so decide to pour yourself a sherry. Then another.