When does Christmas actually begin? I know the big day is December 25 but when do you actually feel ‘Christmassy’?

It would appear that retailers think Christmas is now.

Over the past week or so we’ve seen an assault on both our eyes and heartstrings from shops who’ve decided that what with the festive season being a time for families, the best way to get us to part with what meagre money we’ve got left after paying our energy bills is to try and guilt us into purchasing.

We’ve got posh John Lewis with their now annual blubfest with a twist. This year it’s Watership Down meets woodland capitalism.

A friendly rabbit and bear (who I think are meant to represent a man and woman) part when the bear, who has never seen Christmas, heads off to hibernate.

The unhappy lop-eared loner then looks a bit sad and puts a present at the mouth of the bear’s cave. When all the other animals are celebrating Christmas Day the bear turns up because the gift was, and here’s the twist, an alarm clock.

Cue not a dry eye in the house. The soundtrack to the ad is by Lily Allen, warbling a cover of Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know and rests at number two in the hit parade this week.

Surely, Christmas encapsulated no?

Sky telly, owned by renowned soft- hearted OAP Rupert Murdoch, has produced a similar series of adverts. In the one I’ve seen there’s a rude teenager who won’t take off her headphones and looks to have the hump all the time. Rather than proactively parenting and removing the headphones, the mum finally smiles when the daughter takes off the headphones while they sit down and watch Sky together.

Baby Jesus, who probably would have Sky Movies, would be proud surely?

M&S’ offering is a winter mix of fairytales including Alice In Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel And Gretel and The Wizard Of Oz plus plenty of M&S clothes and good-looking famous people I’ve never heard of. What does it say? God only knows.

Finally, Sainsbury’s are going for it. Is the middle-class purveyor of comestibles showing us pictures of all the lovely grub we could buy to further expand our waistlines? No. Signs of presents under a tree? No.

They’ve apparently crowd-sourced (people have sent in) hundreds of hours of footage of what Christmas means to them and they’ve got award-winning director Kevin McDonald to splice all the bits together.

Frankly I watched it and it’s all right.

The real emotional pay-off isn’t the lonely man with his Christmas dinner spreadsheet (which it should be), but the soldier whose kids didn’t know he was back from Afghanistan.

The amazing thing is McDonald directed the bloody but brilliant Last King of Scotland and his short advert will be turned into a film by Aliens supremo Ridley Scott. I’m not making this up.

What next? Freddy Kruger and Nosferatu enjoying a picnic in a woodland glade whereupon Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump opens fire with a special gun firing Cadbury’s Creme Eggs in a three-part documentary directed by Quentin Tarantino to celebrate Easter?

Probably – and it’ll be on telly from Boxing Day.