ACTUALLY it might come at 12.03am or 10.47pm or, if you have particularly excited children or grandchildren, as late as 2.06am, but at some point this evening the night will finally settle.

The presents will be wrapped, the children and grandchildren will be asleep (or at least pretending to be) and tomorrow's dinner will be half-cooked (it's veggie lasagne in our house, though there are a few unevolved, unreconstructed carnivores who insist on eating a luckless bird) and you can sit down with a pot of tea or a cold, fresh drink, probably alcoholic, and take stock.

It's my favourite Christmas moment, the one that sits somewhere in the vicinity of anticipation. And you can even imagine that the following morning you'll get all the presents you really want rather than that shirt you won't wear, that jumper that doesn't fit and the book you'll never read.

But there's a melancholy to it too. As the Christmas tree lights twinkle on the gifts beneath it's hard not to think back to years past when you were the child curled up in bed closing your eyes whenever an adult came near, to a time when people now no longer around to celebrate where young (or at least younger). And to realise that you are now as old as, or even older than, they were back then.

We mark out our lives through these recurring temporal signposts, whether it's Christmas eve, the first day of the football season or the first daffodil of spring. They pile up and pile up until you can't see back to where they started.

It's a solemn thought. Still, there's a glitter to this particular one, a glitter that has none of the forced, almost desperate jollity of Hogmanay. A glitter that sparkles in the hushed dark with the promise of tomorrow. Merry Christmas.