Yes. It's Christmas shopping time again. The truly organised have it finished – the rest of us are left to battle through the crowds of our own inadequacies, our lists crumpling in our pockets, despair and agitation mounting in our hearts as we realise that the very thing we've just realised would make the perfect present for that hard-to-buy-for friend or relative sold out about a week ago. Not even the miniature mince pies in Starbucks can make us feel better now.

The desperation is a filter across the eyes of our fellow shoppers, turning civilised people into aggressive, stress-ridden shopping machines like the coloured contact lenses which can turn a blue eye brown. And through this same light filter, "can-do" changes to "must-do" and the lists seem to stretch on forever. The small things turn into impossibilities. On returning to my car from this unchoreographed chaos of plastic bags and jostling elbows on two (two!) recent, consecutive Saturdays, I found the damp, crumpled remnants of a flyer for a new local shop beneath my windscreen wipers. As the paper had been rained on, it took ages to peel off the glass, and I'm still finding the white, dandruff-like paper crumbs which came into the car on my gloves. I wasn't happy. Not at all. I'm not proud of it – but in the end, I took the second flyer back to the shop in question and returned it to them. I couldn't help but wonder about the carbon footprint of such an exercise in wasted paper, as I glanced around at the car park littered with abandoned adverts. I think the people in the shop were puzzled. It didn't make me feel much better – not as much as I'd thought it would. But at least I didn't have to drive the flyer home, just for the sake of putting it in a bin…

And the expectation doesn't always match the dream. The first time I was annoyed by this advert, I thought I'd return it if it happened again and then I'd feel so much better. In the same way, the Christmas music playing loudly across the streets and square of Coleraine on Saturday mornings is intended to set a mood with which the accompanying weather really doesn't correspond. Jingle Bells… Sleigh Ride… I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus… none of these really goes with the sort of icy, horizontal rain, borne on a north-easterly gale, which slaps you in the face and makes you feel cold for the rest of the day. The Christmas tree in Portrush was already leaning over before anyone had had time to turn the lights on. Within a week or two it will – as always seems to happen – be lying at the side of the road, its tinsel flailing helplessly and its lights a parody of their own cheer – like a drunken reveller who didn't quite make it home from the office party – a casualty of the winter storms. All those idealised, iconic Christmas memories of snow and frost and clear skies become darkened to the steel grey of a cloudscape full of sleet and hail and disappointment. It's the coldness which stays in your bones for months and makes you shiver at the very thought – not the coldness of red cheeks and woolly gloves and roaring fires and toasted marshmallows.

One Saturday at the start of December, the local bookshop (and how wonderful it is to have a local bookshop now!) was opening its new, redecorated, reorganised, bigger, better, brighter, children's books section. Clowns and face-painters and storytellers had been booked (if "booked" is not too awful a pun in the context). Coming up to the time at which all these people were scheduled to appear, two shop assistants in slightly worn-looking clown costumes emerged from behind the Staff Only door. Straightening their wigs and smiling at each other self-consciously, they paused for a moment in front of a large display of books to refine their masterplan. The title of the books – in a large, person-sized display – was Unleash Hell. The incongruity of this contrast struck me as a moment of pure comedy genius. Two clowns, and hell unleased. Maybe that sums it up? The hellishness of Christmas shopping? The jostling – the pushing – the shoving – the selling out – the near impossibility of shopping for that person who, when asked for hints, just says, "Oh, you know – I don't really need anything. I don't really mind. Just, you know – surprise me." Those words of horror. Unleashing hell. And hell will never more certainly be unleashed than if you really surprise that person… by buying nothing.

And of course, "Buy Nothing Day" takes place in late November. It taunts us – mocks us. Its superiority of motive sneers at us from its pedestal of righteousness and we know we should be doing what it's telling us. We buy far too much, after all – far more than we need, than anybody needs. And yet what are we to do? The expectations of friends and family, created as much as anything else by the vicious spirals of the echoing advertisements and the jingle bells of ringing tills and what we got them last year – these hopes personify themselves as grasping, reaching hands. Because these days, we all want more. Need more, somehow – and Christmas is the ultimate moment for excess. The contestants on The X Factor, when asked why we should vote for them, say "Because I really, really want this." It's puzzling. Since when did wanting something mean we had the right to have it? Millions of people might want to be famous or successful: wanting it doesn't mean, though, that all these people should have this fame or success by right, irrespective of talent or hard work or all those other things by which success is earned. At Christmastime, everybody suddenly wants more. Wants it all. The adverts on the television and the radio make it clear. "This Christmas, get more. For less." "Buy three gifts – get one free." Pile your tables high with defrosted, fatty treats: "That's why mums go to Iceland". Unleash Hell! And anyway: what about all these cut price gifts and every third gift free. Does this mean that we give the free gift to the person we don't really like? So that when they say, "Oh, you shouldn't have…" you end up thinking, "Well, actually, I didn't really…"? Do the cut-price presents equate to cut-price feelings in a bargain bin of friendship and family loyalties?

Of course – you could do the ethical thing. There are so many alternative gift-giving opportunities on offer this year, more than ever before. Give a Goat, Send a Pig, School Shoes for kids in Africa… the leaflets fall from almost every newspaper, every day. And it's a great idea… until you read the articles about the families who had to starve to feed the goat, and who ended up in despair, having to slaughter the animal for food in order to survive. The government officials who intercepted the funds sent, for their own corrupt purposes, in negation of the intentions of the donors. With the best of motivations, sometimes the carefully thought-out "global gift" ends up as the equivalent of the eco-friendly, designer label I Am Not A Plastic Bag reusable shopping bag you spot sometimes on the shoulder of a smartly dressed shopper. It all seems very worthy – very good. And then you spot them – the plastic bags inside the canvas one, full of purchases: the canvas just a front for the same bad habits which we're all trying to shake.

Christmas isn't supposed to be just about the presents. But somehow it always is. Somehow the refrain of Goodwill to all men seems to ring very hollow when that present you've chosen carefully ends up being thrown aside because it didn't cost enough or you got the colour wrong or they already had one. Decking the Halls with Boughs of Holly is just another disappointment if next door's illuminations are even brighter or twinklier or more tasteful. We need some joy in our bleak midwinter. It's not that there isn't room for presents in the face of the "true meaning of Christmas" which our clergymen teach us about – after all, the nativity story itself talks of gift-giving. It's more that the accelerating crescendo of the Christmas shopping frenzy generates its own whirlwind of exclamation marks – more! for less! hurry! – as we hurtle inexorably, faster and faster until it feels as though the brakes have failed, towards the festive red lights of December 25th. So that when we reach the supposedly magical date, we're just too tired and we don't care any more and there's a massive sense of anti-climax as we sink into that Christmas afternoon hibernation of relief. It's all over for another year. And tomorrow, we can go to the sales.

There's just one thing I'm wondering, though.

Several Christmases ago, someone gave me Trinny and Susannah's book, What Not To Wear – without a hint of irony or humour. I wonder… could I possibly get away with giving them that new book by Michael Winner this year? You know the one. The Fat Pig's Diet.

Because they're worth it…