Tony Eyre has his own particular way of taking the stress out of Christmas shopping.
Just in case you hadn't noticed, retailers have already dusted off the festive trumpets to announce Christmas is fast approaching.
Sadly for some, the pressures of hyper consumerism, money worries and unrealistic family expectations mean that Christmas can be one of the most stressful times of the year.
For me, the giving of presents on Christmas Day is still a meaningful tradition that I hang on to.
But I must confess I have been one of those forlorn, mainly male, shoppers wandering around the CBD close to midnight on Christmas Eve, on the hunt for a retail store (usually with its security gates half rolled down) that might harbour that elusive unspecified gift needed to complete the harrowing ordeal of Christmas shopping.
That is, until last Christmas when I turned my life around.
Thanks to a Damascene moment, I abandoned the main street pandemonium of pre-Christmas shopping and instead made a pilgrimage to a place of quiet refuge - the sanctuary of a second-hand bookshop.
Books have long been a popular gift option although not everyone is a book lover.
One anecdote popular among booksellers is about the elderly man from the country who asked an acquaintance what he should buy his son for a present.
''Have you thought about a book?''
''Oh no,'' came the reply, ''he's got a book!''
Well, I am a book lover and no stranger to Dunedin's handful of second-hand bookshops - Scribes, Galaxy, Dead Souls, Arcadia, Vintage, Renaissance, Hard to Find Books and others.
They all have their own individual charm; all overloaded with books; some dusty and disorganised; others more orderly with well presented stock; proprietors a little eccentric and the rare extrovert among them.
In our corner of the commercial world, with the merger of major book publishers, their move offshore, the phenomenal growth in e-book sales, reduction of print runs and the general decline of book retailing, bookshops are viewed as doomed enterprises, guaranteed to be commercial failures.
When I step inside the doors of a second-hand bookshop I'm taken into a different world where the literary voices from a wealth of traditions, cultures and genres lead the reader into new journeys of discovery and imagination.
The bookstore is no stranger to popular culture.
An old film favourite of mine is 84 Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins as the reserved London bookseller who starts a touching correspondence with a New York writer played by Anne Bancroft.
And a more overtly romantic and funny film is the highly popular Notting Hill where a travel bookshop owner (Hugh Grant) and a Hollywood star (Julia Roberts) show how to find love over a book purchase, before internet dating.
When I visit my favourite second-hand bookshop, I feel instantly at home.
There is the familiar greeting from the owner or staff; the well-trodden paths to my preferred authors and genres, usually negotiated side-on because of the narrowness of the aisles; bookcases stacked near to the ceiling; the overflow of book stocks in columns on the floor; and the quietness ... so conducive to the art of browsing, selecting and flicking through the pages of a potential good read.
Relics of Dunedin's bookselling history are familiar finds - books that bear the discrete labels of Newbold's, Hyndman's or Terry's bookshops, old family firms fondly remembered.
A recent discovery of mine was an early book of poems bearing the label of James Horsburgh, a George St bookseller whose business was acquired by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1890 when they established their first branch in Dunedin.
And I must make mention of the aristocrat of the book world - the first edition.
In one of my book haunts I get the approving nod - like a high roller in a casino's Aspinall Club - to enter the closed door to the dimly lit back room where shelves of pre-loved first editions, resplendent in their dust jackets, compete for my attention.
So this time last year, after just a couple of hours of stress-free fossicking in the stillness of a second-hand bookshop, I headed home with a bagful of recycled, books by a host of literary notables, each author and title carefully chosen as a gift for someone in mind - Christmas shopping done and dusted.
And this December I'll repeat this new-found ritual, pleased not to be one of the 60% surveyed that dislike Christmas shopping or one of the many that supposedly come home frazzled without a single purchase for their efforts.
But don't despair.
As J.K. Rowling once remarked: ''One can never have enough socks. Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.''
• Tony Eyre is a Dunedin writer.
