WE'VE done the supermarket dash, which is a relief. The bill was stepper than usual, but we're spending £4 billion in the three days up to Christmas.

This is a collective we, by the way. The Cole budget is woefully distorted already, but four billion would be pushing it.

Asda is predicting that nearly 40 customers a second are passing through its checkouts.

All I can say is, the staff must be a lot quicker than at Sainsbury's. Forty customers a second! What a frenetic picture this conjures of a cartoon chase from aisle to car, with tottering piles of Christmas sustenance, food bought as if for a month-long siege instead of a few days off.

Asda reckons it will sell around 240,000 Brussels sprouts in this period. This is astonishing when you consider nobody actually likes the things. At Tesco, about 2,500 extra staff are helping to ease the mad rush of last-minute consumerism when the store expects to sell 250,000 frozen turkeys, 20 million mince pies and £5 million-worth of sausage meat and stuffings.

Our trolley contained the usual stuff, the beer, wine, nuts, crisps, a wedge of Stilton and other goodies.

The sprouts will be bought at York Market tomorrow. The beef is ordered from the local butchers, the ham will be speeding its way from Manchester on Christmas Day.

In a moment of weakness, when no one was looking, I slipped in the smoked salmon Jamie Oliver has been advertising on the television.

I hated myself for doing this, for being so completely suckered by the matey corporate chef. But at the same time, my tastebuds were tingling so I bought the salmon, a buy which, at more sensible times of the year, would have made my wallet wince.

That's what it's like at Christmas, when good sense goes out of the window and gut-expanding abandon comes in through the wreath-garnered door, loaded with bags from the super-market.

"Only spend what you can afford. Work out a budget and stick to it," says APACS, the card issuers' association.

"Yeah, right," as they say on American TV comedies, a verbal inflexion that seems to have caught on over here, even among 11 year daughters of my acquaintance.

Who only spends what they can afford? Maybe some do, but not many and hardly anyone I know.

Instead, with a family budget full of holes anyway, we go ahead and buy the presents and the food, spending what we can while regretting that greater lunatic largesse is not possible.

Our sons would have loved one of those I-Pod music players; their father would have too. But no, some things had to be ruled out as just being far too expensive.

And when the 12 days of Christmas are spent, there will be three million extra tonnes of domestic rubbish in bins overflowing with wrapping paper, cans, bottles and so on. Some of this will be recycled (our own green box will be groaning) but much of it won't be.

The Government is launching a television and newspaper advertising campaign on Boxing Day to highlight the benefits of recycling.

I'm all for this, although £10 million seems a lot of money to tell us that Christmas is rubbish. Oh, this is not meant literally. Mostly I love Christmas, especially the family and friendship, the drinks and the sociability, and, finest ritual of all, the bedecked tree (a sight replicated about six millions times around the country... all those dead trees to be got rid of).

Each Christmas contains bits from earlier seasons, so that a sparkle-speck of a distant childhood Christmas shows through as your own children enjoy their Christmas.

Oh, look - I've gone sentimental: another Christmas over indulgence.

Whether or not there is a message in all this depends on your relationship with religion. To those whose belief extends little further than hoping for something good on the television - now that really does take a leap of faith - the religious message is buried under a mountain of mincemeat (5.5 million jars and counting).

Whichever way it rolls, have an enjoyable one.

Updated: 09:25 Thursday, December 23, 2004