THANK goodness they're over. Hallowe'en and bonfire night. They're not like they used to be, when children expected no more than a toffee apple and a Catherine wheel.

Now its expense all the way, with outfits, parties and - if they get their own way - no expense spared.

Thank goodness they're over. But hang on, haven't you noticed? Christmas is coming, so it's downhill all the way. To maintain your sanity over the next seven weeks, I recommend that you avoid:

Letting your children watch ITV. All those adverts that make hideous plastic toys costing upwards of £69.99 (and less than 50p to make in some far-off sweatshop) look like something so utterly magical that they will transport your child into another world, must be spurned.

Dolls may look like they turn into real people on the TV, but that's in a slick 15-second commercial, filmed on a studio set by a team of experts with a budget of several hundred thousand pounds. Once unwrapped and in your living room it is a plastic toy that doesn't skip around, do cartwheels or mount horses.

Shops. Mostly small 'interiors' shops selling Christmas decorations so utterly beautiful that you just have to buy them, despite having enough baubles and trinkets to cover a Californian sequoia (bought when you succumbed to temptation last Christmas and the Christmas before that).

I remember the days when everyone, even the Queen, probably, had nought but a few coloured enamel balls, a bit of tinsel and a short string of lights that kept fusing every five minutes. Now we've got fairies in hand-made dresses, finely-crafted wooden reindeer pulling sequin-covered sleighs and jewel-encrusted models of the three kings. And they cost a pretty penny too.

Christmas fairs at school, where an unhealthy number of mothers produce mind-blowing creations - wire fairies with gossamer wings, sugar-coated snowflakes made from doilies, hand-painted papier-mch father Christmases, and all manner of creations that would not look out of place in Country Homes and Gardens magazine. These can only make other mothers like myself, who feel they have achieved something in buying a real Christmas tree from B&Q, feel even more inadequate and useless than they did at the summer fair, when the Jane Asher mums, as I call them, baked cakes more delicious than Delia's and decked out the plant stall with blooms that Alan Titchmarsh would be proud of.

Your bank manager. Christmas means financial outlay that you wouldn't normally have, and we all lose our sense of frugality. At this time of year overdrafts - and extended overdrafts - are almost a fact of life. If I didn't go into the red, I wouldn't be able to buy any presents. I'm afraid it's a case of spend now, repent in the New Year.

Any Post Office. Heaven knows what will happen when the Government gets its own way and closes all but three of them across the UK - that's what it's coming to, the way things are going. Even now, they are typified by the sorts of queues you'd expect at butchers' shops during the War. The next few weeks will be ten times worse. And you have to stand the whole time with only racks of padded envelopes and oddly-behaving customers to look at. I don't see why you can't take a numbered ticket and go off shopping for a couple of hours while waiting your turn.

That just about does it. I'm popping off now to buy loads of sweets to stop my children crying when I tell them they can't watch their favourite TV programmes because of those dreadful commercials.

Updated: 11:56 Tuesday, November 09, 2004