My Christmas non-negotiables: After Eights, stuffing balls and The Good Life Christmas special | Grace Dent

The gift I’d like is a donation to my favourite charity. Tradition, though, I’m sticking in the shredder this year

Through headlines about sky-high heating bills and daily news of restaurant closures, the Christmas juggernaut thunders, parping its merry horn. In a land of uncertainty, here comes one definite: December and all its excess. Let’s be honest: Christmas is all about the “too much”. Its spurious charm is alive in abundance, in groaning fridges and in hands sore from carrying shopping bags. What heralds the little baby Jesus more than a vast, all-butter, ganache-smothered yule log going stale over Twixtmas, when the first pangs about over-expenditure kick in? Generally, this is when you find that a guest has forgotten to take that £20 bath cube assortment you bought them at a Christmas fayre. You resented paying for it at the time, and they forgot that you gave it to them. Happy bloody Christmas.

This year, though, I’ve sworn that things will be different. “Don’t buy me any gifts – I don’t need them. I just want to see you,” I told loved ones in October, hoping to save them from New Year debt, and the planet from choking on yet more plastic. I sounded like fanatical Puritan Lady Whiteadder from Blackadder: “At our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike … I sit on Nathaniel. Two spikes would be an extravagance!” That’s the peril in calling time on Christmas. No one thanks you. And we are, as a country, far too wedded to the wastage, the swapping of jumpers that are too small and too scratchy to suffer, the hand creams that smell of fox urine and the three-jar dijon mustard sets, each more abrasive and inedible than the last.