Christmas is coming, and everyone is tying themselves in knots.

Why do we do it? Why do we suffer this annual nightmare – spending money we don’t have, eating food we wouldn’t normally eat, and dashing around as if there’s about to be a nuclear meltdown?

We put our already busy lives on hold and spend hours fretting about how soon to order the turkey, whether we’ve bought sufficient presents and whether the people we’ve bought them for will like them.

If normal life has margins for error, they multiply ten-fold at Christmas. I’ve already made countless blunders while trying to get everything sorted.

I was so pleased with myself, having found a nice tree at a reasonable cost, brought it home, struggled to set it up in a pot filled with pebbles, which I then soaked in water.

It took me the best part of a morning, but my when husband came home he took one look at it and said: “That’s got to come out – you have to chop six inches off the bottom or it won’t take up water.”

I spent a further four days unwinding the tree lights. I clearly remember last year, carefully coiling them and placing them in the box. But lo and behold, over the past 12 months they have morphed into a grotesque knot.

I bought loads of fantastic crackers in last year’s sales, but ongoing searches of house and garden have yet to reveal their whereabouts, and I was furious to discover that my children had given their schoolmates most of the Christmas cards I’d bought for my friends.

When you think you’ve finished mailing cards, another arrives – usually from a friend in a far-flung corner of the world, meaning a trip to the post office and a half-hour queue just to get the right stamp.

The sherry I bought in a bargain supermarket offer is, my husband tells me, only suitable for cooking, and we can’t buy food much in advance because the freezer is broken.

My eldest daughter is adamant that she wants a turkey “who’s had a nice life”, but having decided against unannounced inspections of local poultry farms, I’m hoping a few huge dollops of cranberry sauce will disguise the Kentucky Fried feast (and a strip of wrapping paper round the bucket).

The children will probably be full anyway, after their usual Christmas breakfast of half a selection box.

One present – a glass bowl – got broken when my husband, in his normal ‘I’ll drop this on the floor without looking to see what it is first’ manner, had to move the package while looking for some aspirin.

As I said, why do we bother?