It's early December, the point of the year when its actually approaching acceptable to have your Christmas decorations up. When men across the Western world just about start thinking about maybe beginning their Christmas shopping. And quite possibly the busiest time of year for Noddy Holder.

The best thing for me is the music. There's something special about Christmas music. Its a genre that transcends all styles and formats, and is the only genre that allows a compilation CD spanning more than five decades to be published - with the exception of Cliff Richard songs, and that's much the same thing anyway, thinking about it.

It still amazes me that the most popular Christmas hits have absolutely no religious content whatsoever. Indeed, the best-selling Christmas song in history - and, oddly enough, the best selling song of any kind - refers almost exclusively to the weather (with a passing reference to the postal service). Yet somehow, despite how simplistic the song might have been, Bing was still convinced that Marjorie Reynolds
needed prompting.

Of course, lamenting over the secularisation and commercial crassness of a Christian festival is only bound to encourage the seeking out and pressing upon us the true meaning of the season - despite only Jethro Tull being aware of the festival's origins. So 70s style parties and merrymaking quickly gave way to intense guilt over such hedonistic times, so most Christmas songs of the 80s have some sort of moral. People were so desperate to remind one another of how fortunate they were that any song with a strong moral and even a passing (i.e.: one word) reference to Christmas. So when the combination of genuine festive theming and a charity single finally came about, it remained the best-selling UK single for 13 years, raising vast amounts for famine relief and spawing not one, but two remakes. We were even happy to overlook the excessive generalisation of the African continent...even though it managed to ignore the existence of the longest river in the world. "No rain or rivers flow"? It's 4000 miles long, Bob!

Some things will always remain the same, though. In particular that wonderfully British Christmas past time...complaining that its not as good as it used to be.