Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la... oh, whoops, there you are already. I'm sorry, I don't ordinarily sing aloud in public, but I didn't see you sneaking up like that. You are a little like Christmas, that way. I knew you would be coming, as you always do around this time, but you always arrive a little more quickly than I anticipate. You must forgive me if I lapse into any further snatches of unwonted carolling, but I am trying to get into the mood, you see.

For too many years now I have been the Scrooge, the Grinch, the Osama bin Laden, the very Bob Mugabe of the festive season. Around this time of year "Bah" trips from my lips with the promiscuity of cash registers saying "Ka-ching", or Simon Gear saying "Um".

Occasionally, when I am feeling expansive, I throw in the odd "Humbug", but mostly I save them up for myself. I can't deny it: Christmas puts the glooms upon me, I get a case of the mean red-and-whites, I lapse into a trough and even a slough of bitter introspection.

What happened, I often cry, to the happy yule days of yore? What happened to the fever of anticipation that when I was a young thing would grip me fully a month before the happy morning, when I would rise each day and open the tiny doors of my advent calendar, smiling happily at the cheery scenes of virgins and wise men and camels and sundry Levantine livestock, and suck at the tiny chocolates in a sacramental ecstasy of expectation?

Our greed and our innocent delight

And oh the blessed, not to say holy, thrill of Christmas morning when I would wake in the lightening dawn and stretch out my feet to prod at the pillow-case of crinkly-wrapped gifts and surprises, trying to assess the heft and weight of this year's bounty. It is the ghost of Christmas past that haunts me now - in those days it was the blessed fact of Christmas presents.

Unlike most old curmudgeons who write snippy letters to the editor about Christmas, it is not the increasing materialism of the season that troubles me about modern times. Just the opposite. I yearn for those glorious days when materialism was enough to make everything fresh and clean and alluring. Through the timeless wonder and mystery - yea, the very passion play - and receiving and unwrapping gifts, I dimly apprehended, as through a glass of champagne darkly, the grander wonders and secrets of the world.

Small children, let us not kid ourselves, are not given to finer appreciation of the ineffable. Our greed and our innocent delight at getting were our conduits to the deeper wellsprings of the soul. Christmas was a time when we got things!

Alas, as we grow older gleeful materialism loses its magic. We become capable of buying things for ourselves - materialism becomes a condition of the personality and the psyche, rather than a gesture from outside, from the great unknowable universe. The thrill of getting no longer is no longer the smoke on the glass - on the other side of the glass was always the world of adults, and the world of adults, as we could first see and then increasingly understand, wasn't all virgins and wise men, although it might quite conceivably involve camels.

But no more of that. This season I am hoping for a second childhood. Indeed, I am trying to will myself into that state. But how? How? I poked my head into a couple of department stores over the past week, hoping for ideas. Department stores are the spiritual home of Christmas. Still, there was nothing there to gladden the heart.

Department stores are the spiritual home of Christmas

Principally, I found a range of quite inexplicable figurines, moulded in the shape of Father Christmas, that play a high and tinny tune called, if my appalled memory is to be trusted, Jingle Bell Rock, and which gyrate their hips and roll their eyes in a fashion to give nightmares to impressionable children.

No, not for me, the dancing Santa Claus. But I have bought a tree, and some tinsel, and I have agonised long and hard about whether it was worth forking out the extra Christmas cheer to buy the high-end tree lights with the built-in options between static, blinking, chasing or musically synchronised. If those terms mean nothing to you, please accept my congratulations.

But still I needed some Christmas atmosphere. I could have just dug out my mother's old Boney M LP, but then this column would not have mentioned television even once.

So instead I turned to Channel 34 of the DSTV audio bouquet. Channel 34 is a special channel, instituted for the season. It is titled "Contemporary Christmas".

Does that sound appealing to you? Really? After three days of "Contemporary Christmas" I can tell you that there is a sub-culture of festive songs at which you and I can scarcely guess.

When I tuned in, Harry Connick Jr was singing Happy ho ho ho to you. That was one of the more sensible song titles.

I was subsequently treated to the Beach Boys' Do Run Run Reindeer, James Brown's Santa's got a Brand New Bag and an unnamed crooner announcing "I'm gonna get me some this Christmas".

Worst of all, every few minutes they play John Lennon and Yoko Ono's ghastly ode to world peace. "And so this is Christmas," whines Lennon through what is left of his nostrils, "and what have you done?" By this time my patience was running low. "I know what you'd just done, John," I snarled uncharitably. "You'd just done about two handfuls of cocaine."

By the time Ricky Martin came on to offer Ay, ay, ay, it's Christmas, I could take no more.

If I am to recapture the festive savour of my youth, it will have to be without ambiguous Latino gentlemen in tight trousers.

It looks like I will have to provide my own pa-rum-pa-pum-pums again this year.