In our godless, temperate island, the true harbinger of the yuletide is not Stir-Up Sunday. Nor is it the first, silent, icing-sugar drifts of snow. No. The first frissons of Christmassiness come in early November, with the major supermarkets announcing which lines they’re going to be aggressively pushing from RIGHT NOW! until December 24, clang KER-CHING, etc.

Asda’s £97 Blu-ray player, Tesco’s half-price toy-sale, Morrisons’ incredible £1 broccoli offer — it’s all coming to us. Since the collapse of Woolworths last year, the big four supermarkets — Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s — have realised that, if they get it right, and discount in the most enticing way, they can now win our entire Christmas in one go, bish-bash-bosh. A customer arriving at 11am could theoretically leave, an hour and a half later, with tree, iPods, turkey, Nurofen, guest towels, handwash, 15 litres of vodka, Santa hat, kitchen knives that could easily be utilised in hand-to-hand combat and one of those self-help books that talks you through the early stages of a divorce.

A report in last week’s Times took us through the offers in amazing detail. Two tins of Roses from Asda for £7! Tesco doing Baileys for £9! Waitrose knocking £6 off premium malt whisky! It’s BOGOF here, there and everywhere.

However, alas for consumerism! For as I scrolled through the list, it made me formulate an even more important list: the things I won’t be buying this Christmas. The items for which the signs reading “BOGOF” will become literal instruction, and prompt me to bog off. And not buy them. Stuff like:

Nuts. This is the year I finally learn not to buy nuts. Whole nuts. Nuts in the shell. I must not buy them. For the previous 12 years, I have come home with a gorgeous mini-sack of walnuts — each one looking as if it has been painstakingly and improbably carved out of a lump of wood, by artisans somewhere in Thailand — and put them in a splendid dish in the kitchen, as a potent symbol of seasonal Christmas plenty. “Oh, the stories we’ll tell, cracking those nuts by the fire!” I think, lovingly nestling a silver nut-cracker in their midst. “Nibbling them with a piece of Stilton! Throwing their shells into the embers, as we sip port!”

Of course, in the event, we absolutely do so much thing whatsoever, at all. Nuh. Over Christmas, who’s going to be arsed catching their fingers in the nut-cracker when there’s an easy-access tin of tasty Miniature Heroes, right next to them? No one I’m related to, I can assure you. And by the time you get to mid-January — a time of no Miniature Heroes — there’s the niggling suspicion that, by now, the nuts will have TURNED inside, and cracking them will release nothing but an EVIL BLACK POWDER full of SPORES.

And then follows a period of time where the walnuts sit in the centre of the house — as if they were a fly-on-the-wall documentary crew, observing our every move; forgotten by everyone, so that we might even have sex on the floor, in front of the nuts, wholly oblivious to their presence. It might be that Christmas walnuts actually have the power to turn invisible for periods of months at a time. It is something I am considering.

This year, I’m proud to say, we attained a new record in Christmas Nut Neglect: it was only on returning from the Glastonbury Festival in June, that I suddenly refocused in on the Christmas 2008 Walnut Memorial Bowl. Initially puzzled by what to do with 500 walnuts, I eventually took the whole bowl out into the garden, and poured them into the bottom of a newly-dug hole — from where they now continue to provide superlative drainage facilities to my new fig tree.

To clarify: we will still, however, be buying ready-salted peanuts — simply because my brother realised during Christmas 2006 that if you slur the word “peanuts” at the end, it sounds a bit like “penis” and can, therefore, make the rest of Christmas pass in a merry blur. “Have you seen my peanuts?” “Listen — do you smell peanuts?” and “Argh, there’s peanut-residue all over the Radio Times.”

Classy booze including champagne. Don’t get me wrong — I love champagne. It’s like a prima ballerina in a “special” glass. But I have a very large family. Essentially, what I do every year is invite locusts over for Christmas. Like, all of them. The ones from the Bible. In these kind of numbers, a delicate, almondy blanc de blanc is rather lost — particularly when it’s likely you’ll turn round and find one of the more “street” members of the clan cutting it half-and- half with Dr Pepper. Obviously, there’s always prosecco, and cava — or, as I called it last time I rolled up to a pub at 4pm in the afternoon, half-cut, “Good afternoon, barman. Do you have any Proseccy, or Cavoo?”

But when it comes to Christmas, what you really need is spirits, because you can just slip them into anything — tea, coffee, cocoa, water, baby’s bottle — and maximise your Christmas Wobbliness. Sherry — or “shezza”, as we refer to it, which somehow makes it a more cheerful drink — is good but, really, when it comes down to it, you can’t beat whisky. Not the fabulous fine premium malts Waitrose are discounting — but something filthily cheap. Not even Bells. The kind of mysterious brands you only see in cornershops. Indeed, were there a brand called “petrol station whisky”, that is what I would buy. Because, at a very reasonable £6 a litre, there’s no excuse not to pop it in everything, give the dishes a final, 40 per cent proof rinse with it, etc.

Gammon. My father is of a generation and background where the phrase “the Christmas gammon” is as natural and fundamental to the season as the phrase “but you promised they’d leave on Boxing Day.” Every Moran Christmas has had a gammon. BUT NOT THIS YEAR. Dad, I’m sorry, but gammon — aka “wet ham” — is a meat that society is trying to leave behind, and this is the year that progress starts to affect us. You know, it’s hard to screw up something as tasty as a pig — and, yet, every gammon joint is a testament to some mad person’s dedication to just such an objective. They take a perfectly good cut, boil it, then bake it — and still find time to also add unpalatably large quantities of salt to it.

The preparation is only marginally less arduous than for the Japanese blowfish, which is deadly poisonous — in a way that some lovely pork is, by and large, notably not. Dad — ham is to gammon what VHS was to Betamax. You’re just going to have to deal with it.