LIKE the climate, Christmas is changing though rather more quickly. Every year, it seems, the festive season grows ever longer, encroaching on November and making inroads into January. It is all pervasive and inescapable, from the mind-mincing muzak to the flesh-creeping TV ads for potions that have the power to transform toads into princesses (or, at the very least, supermodels).

No opportunity to sell is lost. In my inbox recently I received an email from a company in Florida offering to “make Christmas magical for the special children in your life”. What will help me achieve this is a “Personalized Package” from Santa which includes a letter from the man himself, an “Official Map” – of what is not specified – and “Santa’s Nice List”. “Your child’s face,” I am assured, “will light up with pure excitement”.

Seeking respite from such blather I turn to a catalogue of goodies kindly compiled by the retail equivalent of aid workers. It’s designed to remove the pain from schlepping aimlessly from shop to shop like a disorientated drunk. Here, I learn, are the presents men “really” want this Christmas. For instance, there is a games set – draughts, chess, ping-pong bats, etc – which is a snip at £2,300. Other things men apparently really want include a handcrafted wooden skateboard (£285), digital ski goggles (£950), a shaving brush and razor (£425), and a “Gosha Rubchinskiy Chapka”, ie a hat with flaps (£95).

What kind of fellow really wants these items I find it hard to imagine. But I must allow that there are some whose partners and offspring live to see their sonsy faces light up like an over-decorated tree at the sight of unexpected bounty. Most of the men I know – balding, bus-pass holders, blood pressure just about in check, bamboozled by the rise globally of bampots – want for very little, having more books and CDs and ties and socks than they will ever be able properly to appreciate or wear.

When I first started in this inky trade it was traditional in the red-eyed interregnum between Christmas and New Year for male members of staff to wear to the office a new jumper acquired for them by their mothers. Most were geometrically patterned, garishly coloured and generously sized, the better to cover ballooning beer guts. All were worn with cheesy grins and ironic pride. What my fellow inmates would have said had they been given a wooden skateboard, handcrafted or otherwise, cannot be repeated on a Sabbath morning.

It should not, however, be presumed that I am in the No brigade when it comes to present-giving and receiving. On the contrary, I am an ardent fan of both. I am often told that I am the most difficult person on the planet to buy presents for, which is one of those falsehoods that deserves to be squashed with jackboots. I am happy with anything anyone chooses to give me and would never pretend otherwise.

As a giver, however, I would concede that I have not always been successful or sensitive. There are several reasons for this, chief among which is a lack of imagination. It would never occur to me, for instance, to buy a male friend or relative a Gosha Rubchinskiy Chapka, even if I could pronounce it. I did once after a liquid lunch – those were the days! – buy a loved one a bunch of black and pink plastic tulips which went faster into the recycling than an empty milk carton. It was one of those occasions when even I recognised that it would be unwise to trot out the old saw that it is not the cost but the thought that counts.

Christmas, we are told, is a Victorian invention, like flushing loos. This, I suppose, is another example of what we must now call “post-truth”. Had such heresy been uttered in Northesk Parish Church in Musselburgh, where I spent much of my dissipated youth, we ragged-trousered urchins would have been thrown out on our ears and told to memorise the Book of Job before we might be re-admitted. Long before the miracle of online shopping and the diabolical temptation of click-and-collect, we bible-bashers knew all about Bethlehem and the commercial significance of what happened there in a byre 2000 years earlier.

It was thanks to the birth of a baby called Jesus, who was the recipient from three kings of gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh (Matthew 2:11), that we woke up on Christmas mornings in a lather of expectation. What now do I remember of those days? Not as much as I would like. When I was born, 1952, rationing, introduced during the war, was still in force, and would remain so for the next couple of years. The availability of sugar, sweets and meats was restricted. Moreover, you couldn’t buy a banana for love or money. The first real pineapple I encountered was when I moved to London when I was 18. I thought it was a gargantuan hand-grenade.

Christmas was the one occasion of relative plenty. Gold was represented in the form of a chocolate coin: note the singular. Talcum powder was as near as we got to frankincense while myrrh – defined by Chambers as “a bitter, aromatic, transparent gum” – was unrepresented. Stockings, which were then used in lieu of wrapping paper, were stuffed with bits and bobs, including, always, a tangerine, the mere taste of which could transport you from a suburban council estate to a desert island where coconuts fell wantonly from trees.

One year, the first I truly remember, I was given a bike, albeit a second-hand one. Another, I got a maroon tracksuit befitting my sympathy for Heart of Midlothian FC. The emotional effect of that on my father, an unreconstructed Hibs supporter, must have been profound. I had to wait until I was 10 to receive my first selection box, six varieties of sweets and chocolates from Rowntree, including an Aero, a KitKat and a tube of Smarties. The year was 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis threatened us with Armageddon. It has no hold on my memory whereas the selection box remains at its forefront.

The modesty of such gifts was taken for granted. There was never any feeling that we were hard up or that we were missing out on anything. It was a tradition with religious significance. There was virtue in simplicity, generosity in charity, and tatties roasting in the oven. In any case, it would have been unthinkable for Presbyterians to attempt to be one up on their neighbours. Everyone, as far as I could see, was treated similarly. Moreover, the best presents were the most useful, items of clothing and food being perennially popular.

It was ever thus. Writing from Craigenputtoch in south-west Scotland on Christmas Day, 1832, Thomas Carlyle, then 37 years old, thanked his mother for the parcel of gifts she had sent. These included a pair of clogs and “Drawers” – “massy substantial-looking things” which he felt would be “highly welcome in the frosts”. Nothing, however, could compare with the joy Carlyle felt at the sight of a kipper: “no language just now at my command could do justice to it”.

Nineteenth-century literature is remarkable for the regularity with which Christmas crops up, particularly in novels. Interestingly, in Great Expectations, published in 1860, Dickens makes no mention of presents in the opening chapters, which are set on Christmas Day. Instead, he concentrates on the food of which there is a mountainous amount.

Fifty years later, in Howards End, EM Forster turns the act of present buying and giving into a social ballet, in which gifts are bought according to the depth of one person’s acquaintance with another or their place in the class hierarchy. Servants are always given money and a privileged little girl a horse. A copper warming tray is reserved for the rector’s wife.

Margaret, one of the novel's key characters, out shopping with a friend, is struck by “the grotesque impact of the unseen upon the seen, and saw issuing from a forgotten manger at Bethlehem this torrent of coins and toys. Vulgarity reigned. Public-houses, besides their usual exhortation against temperance reform, invited men to ‘Join our Christmas goose club’ – one bottle of gin, etc, or two, according to subscription. A poster of a woman in tights heralded the Christmas pantomime, and little red devils ... were prevalent upon the Christmas cards.”

“No morbid idealist”, Margaret “did not want this spate of business and self-advertisement checked. It was only the occasion of it that struck her with amazement annually. How many of these vacillating shoppers and tired shop assistants realised that it was a divine event that drew them together?”

It is a question to which there is no satisfactory answer, especially nowadays when familiarity with the biblical story is evaporating with the ice cap. We who know it make the connection between religion and retail while those who don’t shop on oblivious. Forster’s Margaret tells her friend: “I do not like Christmas on the whole. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But, oh, it is clumsier every year.”

I know she means, and I share her pain, but I can’t bring myself to agree with her.