It is a callous thing to be curmudgeonly and cynical at Christmas, but I find it impossible to be anything else.
Michael Caine said, when you turn 70, Christmas comes around every six weeks. He's not wrong.
I'm not 70, but if you asked me how many weeks since last Christmas, I would say no more than 12.
Shops had the word Christmas in their windows in October.
Given the current state of retail in Dunedin, I daresay advertising for Christmas 2009 will begin in March.
We have always been a present-laden Christmas family.
We buy the biggest tree on sale anywhere in Dunedin, cover it with so many strings of lights it takes half a day to untangle them on Twelfth Night, and assemble so many presents around its base, the pile crawls across the room like slow-moving lava.
We usually house between 20 and 30 people arriving at dawn to unwrap, the time the children wake up.
This year, I would expect our grandson Rowan, over from Chicago, will receive close to 700 presents.
My wife has been putting things away since February, and when she was informed it would be her job to fill the wee fella's Christmas stocking, she went into total overdrive.
Judging by what she has bought, this stocking will be the size of a conventional Japanese apartment. Rowan, incidentally, is 2 years and 9 months old.
His ability to process and suitably enjoy 700 presents will be sorely tested.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe a child should receive fewer presents, not more. Children have wonderful imaginations.
They are just as likely to enjoy a piece of crooked wood or a bear with no ears, as a two-metre remote-control helicopter, 60 Matchbox cars and a trike that talks.
It is surely an immutable law that each extra present you buy a small child takes away a concomitant percentage of joy from the ones they have already received.
At some of our Christmases, small children have had to open presents in shifts, with a sizeable sleep in between.
Male adults receive virtually nothing at Christmas.
From the proof I have just offered that Christmas is actually punishment on children, it follows that male adults should be treated like royalty at Christmas - they should get both the best and most presents.
"Men are so hard to buy for!" wails my wife on the phone as she compares her empty male present drawer with the empty male present drawers of the other women in our Christmas loop.
Au contraire, if male adult, blessed with a Vesuvian ability to enjoy gifts, was given the same time and attention given 2-year-olds, then they would not be hard to buy for at all.
So far, I have bought all my own presents and allotted them to grateful in-laws and mercifully-relieved inner family.
It is possible a few surprises will slip through - a pair of socks, some golf balls - but there will no iPhone, no 50in plasma television for the office, and no new Callaway ERC Fusion driver.
And then there's the dinner.
We have a tradition of making our own Christmas crackers, which contain tiny gifts, a lolly, a poem and a joke.
It is my job to write the poems and the jokes. One year, I wrote over 200 lines of poetry.
Even if the entire Royal Family was wiped out by the black plague, the Poet Laureate would not work as hard as I did that Christmas Day.
And if you think writing a good joke is hard, try writing a bad one. I have a feeling the writing won't be very good this Christmas.
I'm slowing down.
But then again, it has only been nine weeks since the last one.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
