SO HERE we are, December again and as we hurtle headlong into Christmas play and party season, another year goes by for family Rees without a Joseph in the school nativity.

Another year of helping children learn the lines without a starring role for Team Rees.

I don’t know why I'm surprised; none of my children show any interest in a career on the stage and nothing quite marks the beginning of the festive season as much as a request from school for a dog-eared dressing gown and a tea towel head dress for the nativity play.

I think times like this are numbered. There really are only so many years you can expect to persuade an eight year-old with a highly developed sense of street cred, to squeeze into an article of bedwear and stand up in front of a room of adults, pretending to deliver a stuffed sheep to a plastic doll dressed up as baby Jesus.

I was never keen myself, so I feel his pain.

I guess he should be glad that he appears to be playing the part of the mute shepherd.

While nativity plays are a part of Christmas that I secretly love, there are some traditions that I could do without, one of which being the dragging around shops or spending hours pouring over websites trying to think of some piece of tat to buy that is usually neither wanted or needed.

I love the idea of Christmas, the time of year to appreciate family and friends, spend some time together and exchange thoughtful gifts that show how much we mean to each other.

Somewhere along the line though, that memo has got lost, and now it seems to have become a consumer festival based around indulgence and excess.

It was exemplified by last week’s Black Friday.

A recent phenomenon brought to us by our dear friends and consumers in the USA.

Tucked in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Black Friday seems more likely to be connected with Halloween than Christmas.

Billed as the day to get massive discounts on shopping, the news was full of fights breaking out in shopping centres over cut-price 42-inch televisions, and people queuing overnight for the latest food processors.

I couldn’t help but think that it’s a sad state of affairs when our desire for ‘stuff’ becomes so much more important that a bit of common decency.

I can understand that the chance to save some money when times are tight is one not to be missed too lightly, but really, is there ever a situation when a discounted TV warrants punching someone in the face? I doubt it!

When wallets are full it’s easy to look on with derision and blame people’s greed. But surely shops and corporations need to take some responsibility for convincing us we need to fill our lives with stuff to feel truly happy.

You don’t have be a genius to realise that Christmas is not really going to be made so much better with an M&S mince pie or a pair of handmade sheepskin slippers.

Spending time with family and friends and sharing simple pleasures seems to have become complicated somewhere along the way. As Christmas traditions go, I think I can live without a repeat of Black Friday.

I blame the nativity and the original meaning of Christmas.

Gold, frankincense and myrhh; for a family so poor they had to travel miles on a donkey and give birth in a stable (and not Staples as my young nephew thought).

More useless presents it would be hard to find and weirdly inappropriate too.

What sort of message is this giving to our young impressionable children?

The consumerism was right there in the Bible – now we know who to blame.

If the wise men had brought a couple of warm blankets, a hot meal and a board game to play around the manger, it would have been easier to justify my back to basics approach to Christmas.