Here comes the Christmas hysteria

We're entering the period when the words 'What are you doing for Christmas?' are to be heard everywhere

As anyone who writes for a living will know, the two months preceding Christmas, a boom-time for bookshops, are also, by a strange paradox, a disastrous time in which to have a new book published. The tender shoots of fiction, biography or poetry are invariably crushed underfoot by a bellowing herd of the great TV-reared beasts of the publishing jungle – Palin, Attenborough, Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson – as they stampede towards the check-out tills.

Authors who make the mistake of visiting a packed bookshop in the days before Christmas, when virtually any book that is on display seems to be grabbed by panicking shoppers going for the safe gift option, may wonder why they shouldn't be the ones to benefit from the orgy of indiscriminate spending. Impossible, they will be told by publishers. In fact, it will be said, for most writers it is far better to be published at almost any other time in the year than during this commercial rush-hour. January sees an influx of buyers with book tokens to spend. In spring, readers tend to be looking for new authors. The summer holidays are a marvellous time for sales and as for early autumn... er, well, people like buying a book to read on their way to work.

These tactful, diplomatic lies rarely reassure authors who can see that the vast majority of new books published are sold at Christmas-time. According to a survey published this week, bookshop sales in the last two months of 2001 were worth £264m, nearly 30 per cent of the £960m total for the year. Turnover in December is almost five times what it is in April. The Booksellers Association has bemoaned "an absurd and unmanageable glut" in big new books published at Christmas time. In response, publishers, aware that their most profitable titles risk losing out on the bonanza, wring their hands and push out more books.

There is something culturally depressing about this trend. It seems to confirm that, as an industry, publishing depends financially on the shifting of books as safe, acceptable objects for giving. A book looks good and feels nice, it tends to flatter the recipient in some way, but the vast majority of those given as presents will find their way on to the shelf or coffee table or on to the seat beside the loo after no more than a polite glance through their pages.

But perhaps here, unusually, the book business is revealing a wider sickness. One does not have to be a miserablist Scrooge to wonder whether the increasing hysteria that surrounds Christmas as a time for giving, gathering, repairing fragile relationships that have been ignored throughout the year, is entirely healthy or sane.

We are entering the period in the year when the words "What are you doing for Christmas?" are to be heard throughout the land. They are rarely spoken with the joy of anticipation. Panicky family plans – Whose turn is it to have to have the problem aunt? How can we get out of inviting the oddball cousin? – tend to have little to do with love and much with a rather dreary form of duty.

Maybe it is inevitable. We lead busy, selfish lives. An arrangement that shoe-horns the demands of extended family life into a few fraught, emotional, highly expensive days has brisk contemporary tidiness to it. Under this system, children who have been ignored can be showered with presents, marriages that are drying up can be irrigated with booze, relations who have been forgotten can be appeased with food and fake cheer. It may be tiresome but at least, come January, the duty is over for another year.

The eager, often forced, sentimentality of Christmas is not only stoked up by the businesses, like publishing and bookselling, that profit from it; the Church plays its part, too. Just as family obligations are fulfilled with a useful economy of time, so is worship. A single, slightly drunk attendance at midnight mass or a pre-turkey drone of carols represents, for thousands of people, an annual signing-up to a faith that has as much meaning, in terms of behaviour or belief, as a yuletide sherry at the vicarage.

No wonder that for so many people, the fortnight at the end of the year is a time not of love or reassurance but of stress and loneliness. Maybe it is time for us to wean ourselves off the excess of the Christmas habit, to try to spread the giving, the time spent with family, the parties, the general bonding of relationships throughout the rest of the year. As in the book trade, more is lost than is gained in placing all one's efforts and expenditure into one brief, feverish moment during the year.

For the truth is that there is one significant economic sector whose business bonanza occurs not in November or December, but in January, after the decorations have come down. Wills are changed, petitions for divorce filed – the Christmas boom-time comes late for our learned friends, the lawyers.

terblacker@aol.com