Are you ready for IT?

It was the first time I had heard it said this year. Waiting in the opticians, I heard an assistant ask a man if he was ready for it. Oh matron. What interpretation an empty word can carry. Spoken by Barbara Windsor to Kenneth Williams would create huge nostril flaring and a look of total indignation. But this was not a scene from Carry on Oculist. It is just over a week to Christmas - and the empty 'it' in the question is Christmas.

The empty word 'it' can assume some staggering proportion. Are you ready for it? But most people, when asked, may give a kind of thoughtful yes, and perhaps, with a reigned shrug, qualify the yes by saying "I have to get the veg and get a little something for Uncle Stewart but.... yes, I suppose so." Rather like if Eisenhower was asked if he was ready for it as D Day approached, he might have said, "Yes...I've got the troops lined up but not sure if Rommel' s turning up or not. Still, it'll have to do!"

Christmas arrives certainly not overnight. And for some the preparation is immense. Guided by advice from all quarters ranging from how to do it simply to complicated, how to do it extravagantly or cheaply, how to do it like a celebrity or a hassled mum (Iceland apparently) and how to do it in a modern way or be traditional. Or just go their own way, which is what I imagine most people do, because that's what their family did when they were little and they adopt, amend and argue over details and differences.

Strictly speaking, I suppose there are two being ready for its. Firstly, you might realise that you have to get going in the first place, a kind of mental readiness for it and secondly a physical completeness that points out quite clearly that you will do no more.

Now I have to be ready like everybody else, but what triggers the fact that I must are small and idiosyncratic moments and events which over the years have been a delight. Finishing work was one indicator but there had been two December events that stated, without a doubt that Christmas was here. The Varsity Rugby match between Cambridge and Oxford universities and the buying of the Christmas edition of the Radio Times. These were the triggers to get things going, this was the Rubicon to cross and say there's no getting away from it. Christmas is here. It was like when I was a child, and my regular comic, the Beano, was published with the title banner decorated with snow. That was the moment to begin to get excited.

To explain fully why these two things have this effect is, of course, very personal and of very little interest, but they do trigger a feeling of happiness and anticipation and, after all isn't that what winter festivals are about. In the festival compromise that is Christmas, it is appropriate to begin to look forward and turn the back on the past year. it can ll get a little too complicated and involved.

As someone once said, as she struggled through the door from the crowded shops and market, with carrier bags straining with sprouts and spuds some 30 years ago. "Well, that's it. If it's not in the house, then they'll have just have to do without." Now, she was ready for it.