Maybe I’m just becoming old and grumpy, but Christmas seems to start earlier with every passing year. It’s bad enough that shops started selling mince pies in early September – although that first box did go down very nicely, thank you – but now even Isaac is getting into the spirit of things, as the video clip below shows.

Okay, okay, it was actually very cute. You heard it here first, but it’s only a matter of time before he is celebrating his own Christmas number one single. Move over, Wagner!

In truth, this time of year is a lot of fun, with the boys’ birthdays and Christmas all falling in a six-week period between early December and mid-January, so the holiday period just becomes one extended celebration.

I’m certainly looking forward to it much more than I did last year, which was nerve-racking for a whole load of reasons. By then Heather was deep into the final weeks of her pregnancy with Toby. Of course, we had that night, when both of us were stranded in the sudden, blizzardy chaos of Monday December 21st, and had to rely on the kindness of others to rescue Zac from nursery and deliver him somewhere safe until we could get to him the following morning. Then, in the final two weeks pre-due date, we were snowed in not once but twice, all but cut off from midwives, ambulances and pretty much anywhere you couldn’t walk to. I think it’s safe to say that scared both of us – although ironically when Toby did arrive on a clear, snow-less night, he did so so quickly that I ended up delivering him myself anyway.

Anyhow, enough about last year. Apparently our local garden centre has now undergone its annual transformation from selling plant bulbs to ranging Christmas light bulbs, trees and assorted other seasonal paraphernalia, so no doubt I will end up taking Zac there at the weekend. If he responds anywhere near as excitedly as he did last year, it will be a trip worth making just to see the ear-to-ear grin on his face.

Maybe I’m not so old and grumpy after all.