I wrote the column below in 1996 for a Christmas feature and re-reading it I realise little has changed.

My grandson still flicks to catalogues to complete his Christmas lists, and he's now added a stack of German and Dutch ones as well. He hasn't got his mobile phone yet but he's working on it. My smallest granddaughter, now seven, put 'a flat' on the top of her Christmas list, which is a trifle wishful, and I'm still fighting off suggestions that an extension for the garden hose might be a nice gift for me.

At the time of writing I had just been to a garden centre with a huge stock of Christmas decorations and there really were people matching up mauve fairies with pink tinsel.

A recent trip to a similar store added another dimension. Couples were searching for Victorian style Christmas baubles for that good old fashioned Dickensian sort of festive period we all hanker after.

Just a thought - A Victorian Christmas was fine if you had a bit of cash about your person, not so nice if you hadn't. For authenticity the seekers after nostalgic wassailing might like to add a few starving orphans, preferably with running sores, at least one rag clad beggar, male or female, several people coughing up their lungs in the final stages of TB and a great many gin sodden folk who needed something to take their mind of the next meal, or rather the lack of it.

The nearest most ordinary people got to a present laden candle glowing Christmas tree or steaming giant turkey was through a well lit window from the cold wet pavement, shortly before they had to leap out of the way of a carriage and four delivering a party of revellers to yet another feast.

Perhaps we should remember than Dickens' novels were social comments, not a bible for festive planners of the future.

But enough of political correctness - here is what the television companies all call 'another chance to see' or in this case 'read'. In other words, a repeat, so one of us can go home to watch the X Files.

THERE comes a time when you and your children change places - they finally become grown up and you start on the slippery slope towards geriatric delinquency.

I think we're nearly there in my case - this year my older daughter wants a Sabatier knife set in a kitchen block for Christmas and the younger one wants a new vacuum cleaner. Me, I want satin underwear, a pink track suit and rollerskates. well, forget the skates maybe - not too good for the old rheumatics. But you get the idea. I want fun gifts, they have finally become all mature and responsible. We passed in the middle somewhere without me noticing.

I suppose it's punishment for the tantrums and tears over the years in dress and shoe shops - theirs, not mine (or nearly always) - brought about by my refusal to buy outrageous outfits despite being assured that the headmaster didn't mind if they wore multicoloured boob tubes instead of white Viyella blouses.

Now, with the shops full of lovely slinky outfits, gold tights and jangling jewellery, I'm going to have to buy vacuum cleaners, Dustbusters and the latest type of ironing board. I'm so excited I think I'll have a nap.

Small children are much easier. Most are delighted with anything - or at least until someone teaches them to read. Pre-school learning has a lot to answer for in my opinion - especially when you think you are quite safe leaving store catalogues lying about and then the four-year-old neatly flicks though it and perfectly recites the range and prices of the latest doll craze. It's not 'mum' or 'dad' which are the first words now, but 'Barbie' and 'Ken'.

My seven-year-old grandson has been going around with an Argos catalogue under his arm since he was three, leafing through it like a commercial traveller with his eye on a sale .. "Shall we talk Star Wars Nanny?", he said casually this year, settling down next to me on the sofa with his catalogue, a black felt-tip market and probably a calculator. I wouldn't have been surprised to find him with a mobile phone so that he could telephone his order through.

My granddaughters rely on television for the latest update on Barbie, Tiny Tears, My Little Ponies and all the assorted accessories which go with them and which are all, in my opinion, vastly overpriced. But woebetide you if you think you can substitute anything much cheaper made in Taiwan instead. They'll pick out a slightly oriental looking 'Barbie' from five hundred yards away, even if they can't read.

Now that I'm into my middle aged juvenile mode I sometimes indulge myself by buying very silly things - which don't go down all that well with my newly mature mode family. Last year's Donald Duck soft toy which quacked six nursery rhymes quickly lost its battery, I don't know what happened to the talking parrot and my impulse purchase of the money box shaped like a lavatory which flushed with an alarmingly real sound was greeted with a stony face and disappeared within hours.

I'm also banned from buying one of those lovely giant power water cannons which I covet or anything remotely resembling a bow and arrow even with rubber tipped arrows. I did get a dolphin on a stick which nips people past an eagle eyed daughter last summer - and both my grandson and I got a severe telling off after one of us stuck it up a woman's skirt. It wasn't me, honest . . .

My grandson is, at the moment, very interested in nature and natural history, so I'm buying him a microscope which I note contains, among other things, a slide with a real sheep tick on it. That should be good for at least one screech from a poker faced daughter.

I've already got her seriously worried after she remarked that he was fascinated by a frozen and very definitely dead hedgehog they saw on the way to school. I've told her that they sell junior taxidermy kits in one of our local toy shops.

She's not entirely sure I'm joking, so Christmas morning should be interesting.