THE media has recently reported that we’re all getting excited about Christmas earlier and earlier.

People were searching for popular Christmas terms months ago, and let’s be honest, the entirety of November has been full of signs of the festive season.

There’s been Christmas music, often of questionable quality, playing in the shops for weeks, the Christmas ads have all been on the telly – including the Coke ad, rejoice! – and related goodies and merchandise are everywhere.

Personally, I love Christmas, so it doesn’t bother me one iota, unlike some of my more Scrooge-y friends. They much prefer to keep all the nonsense until nearer the date itself. Bah humbug and all that.

I can’t be anything other than excited because, for me, it means that a trip to my family home to eat Quality Street sitting on the sofa clad in reindeer-patterned pyjama bottoms while watching Strictly with my mum is just around the corner.

Even my husband has been sucked into the bosom of the Mace family, and now similarly can’t wait to take advantage of his father-in-law’s Northern Irish hospitality.

He’ll be downing Baileys and Guinness in front of the roaring fire in his comfy togs, too, nodding off and dreaming of a white Christmas. Which might actually happen this year in my homeland, which increases my excitement tenfold.

To be honest, I am finding that I am really feeling a need for some of Christmas’ “magic and sparkle”, as one major retailer puts it, more than I can ever remember.

Aside from our recent sad experiences, our house is challenging us in the way homes do, developing a leak here and a dodgy pump there, requiring constant phonecalls, visits from tradesmen and a constant stream of our finances out the door in two of the most expensive months of the year.

The recession continues to bite, and here in the UK we’ve read about, witnessed or experienced a belt-tightening dark few years of redundancy, pay freezes, unemployment, homelessness and general grim times.

Here at The Gazette, our beloved editor, Mark Jones, is leaving us next year, and now it’s even being reported that the world is going to run out of chocolate.

The news from the wider world has been so hard to take in, too, full of barbarism on a terrible scale, hate and death, in addition to the Ebola crisis and the fact that millions of people are still starving and have no access to clean water.

So, in addition to the froth – decorating the house, baking goodies and so on – we have tried to retain a sense of Christmas perspective, making donations to Crisis and to Shelter, and, despite all the glitzy distractions, trying to count our blessings and think of others less fortunate before ourselves.

One of the key Christmas messages, wishing for peace on earth and goodwill to all men, has lost none of its importance. 

In fact, it seems more relevant than ever.