I’m not talking about the shopping trips for gifts, groceries, or for those last minute forgotten items like the turkey; but wrapping presents. In my house, jobs for the festive season are allocated according to intelligence, which leaves me at the bottom end of the rota, doing simple tasks involving physical strength.

There are bags of coal to be brought into the garage from the back of the car and then, one at a time, to be brought back out again to the step outside the front door - with the usual pause for recovery after I bang my head on the garage door frame.

 
Extra chairs have to be brought down from various rooms and assembled round the dining table for Christmas lunch. Bags of shopping have to be dragged from the back of the car into the kitchen. But these physical tasks are nothing compared to the task that awaits me in private on Christmas Eve. It is another physical task, but there is a mental element. The task of course is wrapping presents.

There is no way out of it, nor should there be. Presents have to be wrapped, and I accept that. I once tried to give my nephew a cookbook without wrapping it; it was made clear to me, that it didn’t matter how famous the chef was, the effect had been spoiled - perhaps forever - by the fact that there was no wrapping. I already knew all that, but I hoped to get away with it at least once. But you can’t get away with it. In that respect, our house is like Japan, where the wrapping of the present is at least as important as the gift.

Many years ago, on my first hotel sales trip to Japan, I handed my first appointment a tin of Bath Oliver biscuits, but I handed it to her in a plastic bag. She received it politely but later on I was told I might as well have hit her over the head with it.

Wrapping the presents shows that you have not only spent your hard earned cash, you have taken care. I can see the force of that argument. Unfortunately though, I wrap to a low standard.

Very low.

All presents given to me will be wrapped impeccably. All presents given by me will be immediately identifiable by the clumsiness of their wrapping. It shouldn’t be like that: I watched all of those Blue Peter programmes, not just the ones where you make a collapsible three-piece suite out of empty toilet rolls and cotton reels, but the one where Valerie Singleton showed us how to wrap anything beautifully - and it wasn’t just that elephant either.

However good that advice was - and notwithstanding it was all broadcast in black and white in those days on a three channel dial-operated television - I’m still a rubbish wrapper (or should it be wrapperer?).

I’m a good receiver though, and often ponder which was my best present ever - my greatest gift? Was it the Subbuteo set or the Scalextric with the figure of eight track and the chicane? Was it the 1962 Beano Annual or the white George Best football boots? Mmm...let’s park that one for a moment.

The other hard part of Christmas is deciding what to watch on television when you are so full of food that you can’t walk, or even stand. Sadly, Morecambe and Wise are no longer here to record a Christmas special, but we know where we are when we see Frank Capra’s masterpiece “It’s A Wonderful Life” advertised, probably sandwiched between Holiday on Ice and Strictly Come Carol Singing.

I know that you are all familiar with it, but the film, starring James Stewart (at his absolute best) is a modern day parable of virtue being it’s own reward, and tells the story of George Bailey, a frustrated businessman in small-town America who is about to take his own life as he contemplates what he considers to be a failed existence. A Guardian Angel turns up and grants George his wish that he had never been born, and then George is shown what would have happened if he had not lived; it turns out that the world would have been much poorer without him.

George learns in reality, he has actually touched the lives of many people and despite his problems and deprivations, has actually had a wonderful life, as in the title of the film. So he returns to life and to Bedford falls with fresh enthusiasm and confidence, and everything works out.

The Angel’s gift to Bailey was to show him another dimension, which apart from being a brilliant plot device is also a very clever thematic one.

Appropriately, the film is not dissimilar to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol". It’s a moral tale of good against evil, selfishness against generosity of spirit, determination versus self doubt. But there is no doubting George Bailey’s frailties, which mark him out as a human being and one who is as frail as the rest of us. In the end, he is saved not only by Divine intervention, but by the generosity of his friends. As it happens, the screenplay is based on an earlier short story written by Phillip van Doren Stern, entitled, “The Greatest Gift". The author, who was not a fiction writer but an historian, could not initially get the tale published, so instead he had 200 copies made and mailed them to his friends as Christmas cards. It was this self determination that led the story to be discovered by Hollywood who then turned it into the Capra movie that is now so famous.

The movie is full of wacky and interesting characters and always makes me think hard and long, not about missed opportunities or failings, but about how fortunate I have been to have built up such a rich life scrapbook - full of treasures contributed and edited by so many. Some of those faces are grainy now or even faded. But they remain still. 

So, back to the future as it were: what was my greatest gift, ever? The answer is a simple one. It doesn’t matter how you wrap it, what it cost, who gave it to you, how cool it is, how long it will last, how much pleasure you get from it. George Bailey found out in the Capra movie, and I realised years ago, and was reminded again recently, the greatest gift is life. It really is.Treasure it. Revel in it. Be in it.