We are being troubled by toys. They sit in a mound in our living room, wedge themselves down the sides of the settee, roll under the bed to gather dust and scatter across the floor to wriggle under our feet with a squeak and a squawk in the night. These toys will not be worked through like the food spilling out of an overfull fridge and we will not give them away; they will only accumulate and multiply as the months and years go on.

I like to consider myself a restrained toy buyer, desperately staving off temptation with the odd oh-so-cute treat for special occasions (and, yes, I admit it, sometimes when a child may be feeling a little under the weather). But we still have masses of stuff knocking around the flat. So when I see the crowds flocking to the tinsel-clad toy department, three trucks, a keyboard, a fairy make-up set, and some plastic power drills already weighing down their metal baskets, I have to wonder how people move for flashing plastic objects in households with parents of a more generous bent.

It is true that there are so many wondrous toys for children. Some will teach your child to count. Some will be your child’s best friend. Others will sing to them of all the colours in the rainbow, until the battery runs out. Most (apart from those organic wooden ones which liberal-minded, slightly over-competitive parents will be drawn to but no child would dream of grasping with their sticky, chubby fingers) will invariably delight your child on first acquaintance.

And there is the heart of it. This childish delight is an addictive thing. Have you ever noticed how hard people work to get a child to collapse into a fit of giggles – one chortle and they are blowing harder, tickling more quickly, pulling fingers in mouths into the most painful of distortions only to hear more and more and more. So perhaps these toys, these gifts we pile under the Christmas tree, are mostly about catching a glimpse of an amazing smile and excited eyes. But most toys do not become favourites. After those first few charmed moments, they are flung to the bottom of the toy chest or pushed down the sides of the settee, because the few old favourites are more appealing.

There was something in the crowd in that toy department that stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of excess and probably a bit overheated in my woollen hat and heavy winter coat, I found myself taking the plastic power drills and putting them back on the shelf. I had probably been reading too many old fashioned stories about children only having one teddy and one ball – the lucky ones, that is. Or maybe I was thinking about how the adult singer in Twelve Days of Christmas only gets 12 presents (or 78 depending on how you choose to understand it, but we won’t think about it like that for now), the giving of which is distributed over the course of nearly a fortnight.

And as the days grow longer and Christmas creeps to New Year, my resolution can be to relearn that song about a rainbow and to spend a bit more time on counting games. Good job I don’t need batteries.