CHRISTMAS shopping is a veritable minefield. I don’t mean fighting through the crowds in the High Street, blocking your ears to the endless Christmas music in the shops and dodging the puddles and the slush.

That’s the easy bit. The difficult bit is deciding what to buy for whom, and indeed who to include on the card and present lists. The potential for permanently alienating someone or creating a family rift that will last for decades is enormous in the best of times. In these days of tight finances, it’s even worse.

First, who to buy for, and will Aunt Gladys mind if you decide that you can’t afford a box of chocolates for her this year after including her on the list since time immemorial because, after all, she is your aunt, even if you do forget about her for the rest of the year. What about those Christmas cards for the office? How to decide who gets your card and what do you do when you’ve handed all yours out and then someone you didn’t include gives you one? Do you hurriedly root around for that tawdry card you decided not to send to anyone because it was just too bad?

That leads me on to the second problem. What to buy? Do you try to impress the recipient with your generosity by buying something as expensive as possible, or that looks as expensive as possible?

But instead of showing how much you like them, that could be seen as bad taste and flaunting the fact that you still have cash to throw around when everyone else is tightening their purse strings.

If you buy something cheap, does that mean that you don’t like the recipient as much as they think you do or that you are a scrooge?

And what do you do when you know that the recipient has hit hard times or been made redundant? Do you buy them something they need, but can’t afford, and how do you give without rubbing their noses in their poverty? Or do you buy something along the lines of what they can afford to give you – and risk being accused of being mean-spirited?

If you are the person without a job or income, how can you eke out your few pennies to buy something for everyone, and cope with their false smiles that try to say “it was exactly what I wanted”

when they open the cheap bottle of eau de toilette.

Joining the Christmas shoppers I noticed a different air in the city centre. This time last year there was a frenzy of enjoyment as though we were all trying to forget about the deepening depression and cling to the last of the boom times before 2009 forced us to face bleak reality.

At the end of this year of redundancies, cash cutbacks and closures, there is a sense of loss and of the uncertainty and impermanence of everything once believed certain. We are more aware of the people who won’t be round the Christmas tree because they have died, because they are missing, because they are away on active service. We don’t miss them for the long-since lost presents that they bought us in times past, we miss them for their smiles, their humour, their mannerisms, their helping hand, their presence. So perhaps the answer is not to worry about exactly what to buy or what someone has bought for you, but to treasure the people still with us because you can’t know who will be missing from the Christmas circle next year.

In the end at Christmas it’s not What that matters, it’s Who.