I'm sorry, but one of the most stressful things about Christmas has got to be the unceasing advice on how to make it painless.

We get it every year, in magazines, newspaper, on the television and radio, so-called experts spout forth with tips on how to make Christmas a doddle.

These tips are seemingly endless and no stone is left unturned. They range from when to buy wrapping paper and when to post your Christmas cards (who to send them to was also covered in one article - as if it's anyone else's business) to how much freezer space you will need for the turkey and how to fold table napkins in a way that will impress your guests.

I can't understand the purpose of all this advice - which usually appears under a heading along the lines of Christmas Survival Guide. The people it is aimed at - mature adults - will have lived through enough Christmases to know how to decorate the tree and how much sherry to leave out for Father Christmas.

I can only think that it is intended to give us all an inferiority complex. To make us feel hugely inadequate in some way because we haven't helped the children make a festive crib scene using pieces of tin foil, pipe cleaners and cotton wool balls. Or that we have been so stupid as to overlook buying cinnamon-scented candles to burn on Christmas Day.

I was aghast at one piece of advice, sent to me at work in the form of a cassette, which urged families to eat mainly food from the freezer in the run up to Christmas to make room for the turkey.

Does anyone other than Santa - and possibly Jane Asher - take Christmas that seriously? The guidance promised that, were I to heed the advice, I would "breeze through the busiest days of the year floating on a cloud of calm and serenity".

In fact, I became worked up within half-a-minute of switching the tape recorder on, after hearing how I should post cards early and send them second class to save money. I tend to post mine so late I need to fork out for Red Star couriers.

Try as I may, every year I just don't seem to get sufficiently organised to send cards on time. So, almost immediately, I felt festively inadequate.

Yet when you think about it, many of these so-called tips are ridiculous. Every year they stress the importance of testing and re-testing the tree lights. That may have been vital a decade ago but nowadays; tree lights are not the dodgy bulbs-strewn-haphazardly-along-a-bit-of-wire affairs they once were.

They are highly unlikley to be so shoddily made as to lead to the destruction of your living room and possibly your home. In these 'compensation culture' times, companies would never be so lax as to let that to happen too often.

My advice is to not to take any advice. Go with the flow.

Your Christmas may or may not turn out fine - but no amount of ludicrous festive tips on the perfect table centrepiece or how to wrap an awkwardly-shaped present will make a scrap of difference.

Updated: 09:50 Tuesday, December 16, 2003