'Tis the season to go bust

It is now considered very un-British not to go bankrupt during the Christmas season. Everything is for sale and everything must be bought, no matter what it is.

To the nation at large however, all this giving of gifts, all this wrapping up, this secrecy, seems rather childish and we have to be whipped into doing it.

Every year retailers claim their business will be in ruins unless we rush to the stores and this year they’ve recommended a cut in bank interest rates to help us on our way to financial doom (they got it too). All media run endless pages of suggestions to save us from our impoverished imaginations.

Despite it all, some people go through their whole lives giving and receiving socks at Christmas, in a kind of minimalist ritual, a barely discernible nod in the direction of Goodwill to All Men. They’ll also take a small glass of sweet sherry and a half-pound box of chocolates but draw the line at a grope under the mistletoe. The word “humbug” creeps into their vocabulary.

However, at least our gift exchange systems are more subtle than the classic Polynesian examples which all social anthropology students have to learn about before going to the pub. While the hierarchical distribution of pieces of a butchered animal survives with the dismemberment of the Christmas turkey, we adopt a broad range of approaches and our gifts can be divided into four major categories:

Useful: Power tools, whisky, fly-tying equipment. We’re not terribly good at understanding what counts as useful to other people, which is where our vast “nearly new” industry (particularly in power tools) comes from. It’s also why we drink so much whisky.

Useless: Power tools, things shaped like fish, actual Gifts – things which have no other purpose than to be given to someone else (ie about 75 per cent of all manufactured objects). These gifts cycle through social networks over time, and it can be comforting to find the same one cropping up every few years. When you pass it on again you sometimes paint it first, brush out the dead flies or take the handles off.

Egocentric: Jars of home made jam for instance or a ghastly photograph of your dog made into a jigsaw puzzle.

Deliberately provocative: Socks, for instance, or aggressive lingerie. A great-uncle of mine once gave his wife a ton of horse manure for her Christmas present. She responded with matching bed-linen, something no man has ever consciously bought.

So, anyway, if everything goes according to plan the only people with any cash by 25 December will be retailers, their advertising agencies and PR firms. The rest of us will have to rely on finding a silver threepenny piece in our Christmas Pudding.