It is, isn’t it? It’s not us being Grinchy (you know we love Christmas) but it’s only October! Only the first week in October!

That means that there are 11 weeks until Christmas – that’s one fifth of the  year still left to go! The trouble is if we start thinking about Christmas too early, we’ll be bored by the time it gets here. It’s like a kind of systematic desensitisation – it starts with a few baubles appearing in the shops in late September and then builds and builds so that by 25 December, we are so used to it all that the decorations have just become part of the background. The problem is, systematic desensitisation is used to help people overcome phobias and extreme fears – not to help them enjoy ‘the most marvellous time of the year’. (Although if you do suffer from christougenniatiko dentrophobia*, we hope that you are getting some help – but from a proper source, not the mall!)

So we’ll be throwing ourselves into the Christmas preparations, but not until December. There’s too much to enjoy now to be wishing it away:

And there’s only 78 sleeps to go!

*Fear of Christmas trees