One hundred and fifty years ago, when Santa Claus and his alien sleighship were discovered frozen in a glacier and thawed out by Arctic scientists (such as out of The Thing or Alien vs Predator), the only presents he had to deliver upon waking were to grateful Victorian children, whose Christmas faces shone with glee as they gazed upon their magical gifts of an orange or a hoop. Or some wood with a nut on the end.

Nowadays, though, as we’re all only too aware, nutty wood just isn’t going to cut it, and the face of any child given an orange on December 25 will look at you as though you’d just presented some sort of gift-wrapped maths lesson.

Children these days have grand designs. They want a lifesize robot dinosaur that plays MP3s out of its roaring mouth. They want a Glock 9mm with a built-in camera because that makes it easier to put their shootings straight onto YouTube. They also would like an iPod that doubles as a Subaru Impreza. If you add together the weight of that lot per child around the world, poor old Santa’s kerb sleighweight has increased a trillionfold, and before he knows where he is, he’s being fined by Ken Livingstone. And that’s even before anyone has emissions-tested his reindeer.

But it would be pointless to rail against the commercialisation of Christmas, because it’s an unstoppable tide. Bah humbug!

Virtually every news bulletin leads with a report on the state of high street sales. Bespectacled economists tell us that should this year’s Christmas not be sufficiently commercial, the country will go bankrupt and the bailiffs will arrive from China. If you don’t go out and spend money on that Body Shop bath gift set, house prices will fall and we will enter a long winter of discontent. In fact, as Christmas shoppers, we are the last defence against the coming of the “financial storm” that is certainly heading our way.

The shops haven’t been slow to recognise this. This year more than any other, if you pick up any newspaper or magazine, out of it will spew catalogue upon catalogue of gadgets and gifts like papery vomit. In shops I now make sure I pick magazines from the shelf by their top right-hand corner, thereby ensuring that all of the gift pamphlets full of electric wine-bottle openers and leather-look “bedroom valets” for the overnight storage of keys and coins immediately fall onto the floor, saving me from taking them home.

Yes, there is a veritable plague of gift catalogues visited upon all our houses. Open one at random and you’ll find an eye-bursting display of helicopters that can fly indoors and bedside alarm-clock cubes that change colour. Turn over the page and there’s a flowery wheelie-bin cover and a credit card torch that’s as thin as Posh Spice. Christmas is a gift war of attrition waged by retail generals whose chief weapons are glossy free catalogues. And they’re winning.

As the big day approaches and the wine becomes mulled, I find myself settling on the sofa staring wistfully at pictures of solar-powered garden lights disguised as a rock. For some reason I suddenly need a sonic mole chaser and a foldaway ramp that will help my dog get into the back of a car. And I don’t even have a dog.

I’ve been hypnotised by the promise of a better life, the entrance to which is calling to me from a booklet of “inspired and stylish gift ideas”. I want these things and I want them brought by Santa on a sleigh that can fly indoors, pulled by 12 Robosapien robot dinosaurs (batteries not included).

Normally, of course, I would feel guilty about this desire, about my flesh being so weak that all it took for me to give in to temptation was a picture of a remote-controlled car. But this year is different: I feel as if it is my patriotic duty to spend lots of money on absolute tat. This year I can have my expensive Christmas cake and eat it.

Jon Holmes is a writer and comedian. He presents a show on BBC 6 Music on Saturday afternoons and appears on Radio 4’s The Now Show, on Fridays at 6.30pm