Suzanne Harrington: Make a Christmas pre-nup. No unnecessary presents

Suzanne Harrington: 

This Christmas, as we burn furniture to keep warm and our pets look increasingly edible with the 25th bearing down, the UK money-saving expert Martin Lewis advises going cold turkey on unnecessary gift buying. Things being what they are in the UK – like Ireland, only a million times worse – he suggests we all make a Christmas pre-NUP: No Unnecessary Presents.

For those living in actual poverty, eating out of food banks and freezing indoors, this will be acutely obvious, seeing as even Necessary Presents remain a challenge and a major source of stress; but for everyone running around buying festive crap for their kids’ teachers, their hairdresser, their second cousin’s neighbour’s cat – the message from Martin Lewis is simple. Just don’t.

And yet the worst thing for an Irish person to be thought of is mean. The English don’t seem to mind it too much, but we would rather die than have someone call us tight.

And so Christmas increasingly resembles those weddings which take an impoverished Indian villager decades to pay back, except with credit cards instead of dowries.

And the worst thing is you’ve just managed to pay Christmas off when – bang! – it’s here again, relentless as herpes.

So what do you do if every penny you earn is going on a vastly inflated mortgage for a very ordinary house?

You send out early warning signals that this Christmas, it’s the thought that counts. And then you set about thinking, and getting inventive. Making things.

This doesn’t apply to children, clear recipients of Necessary Presents, but for everyone else, there’s the joy of the homemade present.

Yes, it takes slightly more effort than scrolling and double-clicking, but the advantage is you don’t end up in debtors’ prison by January.

And what kind of monstrous ingrate is going to rip open your homemade gift, look stricken, then fling it on the floor and storm off?

Nobody over the age of 18, right? Just make sure it’s not terrible.

If all you can do is crochet loo-brush covers, maybe debtors’ prison wouldn’t be the worst option. Wonky glass art, homemade soap that smells of wee, candles that won’t burn – we’ve done them all.

Stick instead with crowd-pleasers – whatever it is, dip it in chocolate, roll it in chocolate, drizzle it in chocolate.

Tie it in ribbons, wrap it in earnest brown paper, hand-write the ingredient tags, call it ‘artisan’.

You might even open an Etsy shop as you’re at it, and be so successful you end up on Dragon’s Den and become a millionaire and outsource it all to sweatshops.

That’s what I’m hoping will happen as I make everyone jars of body scrub from recycled coffee grounds.

This requires a lot of coffee, which is why I’ve been wide awake and shaking slightly since mid November, but imagine their faces on Christmas morning as they unwrap their special hand-filled jars of old coffee to rub on their cellulite in the shower. 

It’s what Christmas is all about.