It's the height of summer, the weather is warm, the leaves are green and the impulse to shop is motivated more by the wish to stay cool than it is by any desire to share seasonal goodwill. Our thoughts are probably as far away from Yuletide as they could be, but already that season's shadow is on the horizon, lurking like some obese cruise-liner. The old woman in your life has probably already began to hoarde her pennies in preparation for a August attack on the Summer sales -- a few DVDs for her nephews, a few thin and redundant-in-Winter socks for her grand-children. She's a canny lass. She knows exactly what she wants and where she'll get it, those inspired Christmas Gifts. 'Tis a shame, because a little education might reform her ill-gotten ways. There must be a better way?

Yes, there is. It's an amusing if unsurprising irony that Christmas, that most loved and feared of seasons, performs the ugly act of commemorating the life of history's most ascetic man by coercing its celebrators into gorging themselves on crass commerce. Santa Claus has become a by-word for pecuniary insanity - business has baffled his image by an act of peculiar kidnap. His originator, Saint Nicholas, earned his godliness by acts of kindess to children; now we repay that historical debt by acts of great unkindness to the children of today. We cajole them into the whole sordid enterprise. Temptation never had it so good.

The rot started early. Nineteenth Century New Yorkers, enamoured of their European roots, elected to remember the Dutchman St Nicholas with prose and poesy by, among others, Washington Irving. The later poem "The Night Before Christmas" set the idea's tone in stone; St Nicholas gave, therefore we must give. Egregiously. "There's no sense in holding back", they thought, "we may as well give it our all; there must be at least one day in 365 that isn't coloured by toil, struggle and misery, and giving is the way to do it!"

Today, plenty of companies offer Christmas Gifts. Some more enterprising than others. One company offers bespoke wrapping paper. How wonderful.