All I wanted for Christmas was a metallic grey puffball skirt, Jilly Cooper’s novel Harriet, Madonna’s True Blue album on cassette, a sachet of wash-in/wash-out champagne blonde shampoo and a box of Black Magic chocolates. I was 11 and these items were the grand sum of the international sophisticate I yearned to be. ‘I don’t know how I had a child quite so naff, or so precocious,’ I heard my mother say with a laugh to a friend. ‘She has asked Father Christmas for a bottle of Babycham in her stocking.’

‘Au contraire, philistine!’ I thought, outraged. I wasn’t planning on DRINKING the Babycham, I was planning on holding it and lip-synching ‘But I never knew love before ’til you walked through my doooor’, in the puffball on Christmas morning. I wasn’t a child alcoholic: I was simply a sucker for a good advertising campaign. The new soft drink ‘health tonics’ of the Eighties, which promised botanicals and vitamins (Purdey’s) and a herbal influence (Aqua Libra), held me in similar thrall. Sadly, they were not on offer at the under-14s festive disco in the local hall of my grandparents’ village. It was orange squash all the way, as George Michael lamented the loss of his heart, and the girls and boys resolutely ignored one another through a sea of The Body Shop’s White Musk and dry ice.

These days, I want things that smell and sound like Christmas, taste like Christmas, promise Christmas. Bay-scented candles, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, ginger wine, chocolate oranges, child choristers and The Snowman by the late, great Raymond Briggs – in the company of stuffed, dozing, doting loved ones. Whether you are religious or not, I believe it’s the rituals, the feeding, the gathering-in, the glorious, tender hope intrinsic to Christmas that is so potent. It’s the humanity that lives on in the story of two young people without shelter, and the baby born to them under a glittering night sky, thousands of years ago.

I’ve written here before about duality and one of the many things I’ve come to accept – perhaps even grudgingly love – about the holiday season is the bittersweet duality that inhabits the month of December. It’s a vast spectrum, ranging from exquisite joy to sadness and yearning. ‘We are homesick most for the places we have never known,’ wrote Carson McCullers. The gamut of emotion felt by many of us over the Christmas period strikes me as such an honest reminder of what it is to be human; sometimes elated, coasting, defeated and, occasionally, just downright homesick.

‘Oh god, Mummy’s getting a bit sobby,’ my children would say with a sigh, as they saw my eyes brimming in the face of the late Queen’s speech. Or when Fairytale of New York is played for the millionth time. In turn, they will see me shake with laughter as the festive ceramic I’ve made – meant to be a beatific angel, but looking like a cross, bald Dalek – appears at the table, wearing Barbie’s sombrero and carrying her handbag.