Yes, it’s tacky and lower-class, but my tree is up and my house looks like an elf’s grotto. Snobs will sneer, but we should all be celebrating Christmas early: ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT

My Christmas tree went up today. Even for me, that’s a record.

But someone close to me was just diagnosed with cancer, Andy Burnham is Prime Minister, the cost of living continues to twirl out of control, I’m tired and my laptop is on the blink. I want some festive joy and I want it now.

Christmas is the greatest, most magical celebration of the year. You can’t persuade me otherwise. Birthdays are enjoyable only if you’re a child or an adult narcissist. Weddings are soppy and disproportionately expensive. Valentine’s Day is ghastly. Easter has macabre undertones. The whole of summer is a sweaty mash-up of wasps, picnics and noisy beer gardens. Halloween is great fun but its best attribute is that once it’s over, Christmas preparations can finally begin. And Christmas, in case I haven’t made myself suitably clear, is the pinnacle of the year.

Why, then, should we ration one of life’s few reliably joyful occasions to a measly few weeks in December? This year, one chocolate company has launched a 54-day advent calendar. Ha! I have an annual calendar that specifically counts down the full 52 weeks to Christmas which hangs on our kitchen wall all year round.

It’s not just me. A survey published this week found that 43 per cent of Britons believe the traditional 24-day Christmas countdown is too short. I’m among the 9 per cent to be erecting our tree this week, apparently.

This study was conducted by Celebrations, the manufacturer of the aforementioned 54-day calendar, so it’s not peer-reviewed, but it sounds about right to me. Approximately 90 per cent of my associates think I’m stark-raving mad to be getting a tree this early – including all the garden centres I called requesting one – but there are a small handful who get it.

I’m aware that all this is considered ‘tacky’ and ‘lower-class’. My own father holds the old-fashioned opinion that Christmas should last for exactly 12 days. He will begrudgingly pull a cracker on the big day itself, but I have never successfully persuaded him to don the paper hat.

‘Most posh people dread Christmas,’ my friend Lady Sybilla Hart tells me. ‘You have to buy presents for gardeners and cleaners and massive families. We find the whole commercial aspect quite trying.’

I, on the other hand, embrace this aspect wholeheartedly. And I don’t pretend to be tasteful. The more decorations the better, as far as I’m concerned – and they needn’t match. In fact, nothing brings me more happiness than the chaotic nature of my ever-growing collection of relics of Christmases past. I’ve got elegant baubles, garish ones, novelty ones, poorly executed toddler creations, memorials of dead pets – you name it, it’s on my tree or strewn about my house.

I do have some basic standards. I would never stand for a plastic tree and I have drawn the line at buying tinsel in recent years. It always smells funny and it’s terrible for the environment. Not that any of my festive decor will end up in landfill during my lifetime. Nothing, bar the tree, is ever discarded, no matter how tatty. It goes back up again every year, to my husband’s quiet dismay.

He’s German and hates clutter. I’m sure he’d rather not spend the next two months tripping over my Christmassy entrails. ‘It looks like an elf has been sick all over your house,’ he told me the first time he witnessed it. I bristled with pride.

I’ve often wondered what’s behind my utter devotion to this event, especially given I’m an atheist, an introvert and a cynic. You’d think I’d be more in the Ebenezer Scrooge camp. On the contrary, it’s the only time of year I love being in churches, the only occasion for which I’m happy to don a party dress and I fully endorse the lie that is Father Christmas. I hope my children believe in him for as long as possible.

Not everything is to be celebrated, of course. I could have done without Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix Christmas special last year. This year’s John Lewis advert – an eye-rollingly woke turkey of a production – spotlights the least appealing aspect of the season: spoiled, entitled children who are hard to buy for. The only Christmas Day I ever recall not enjoying was on account of a bratty toddler we were hosting.

Those hazards aside, what’s not to love? The music is splendid. The films and ballets are sublime. Fairy lights make every space look whimsical, no matter how poky it might otherwise be. The food is exemplary; a cuisine in its own right. Charities do well at Christmas, which can only be a good thing. So do businesses, which they need in this economy. We get time off work. Families come together, even across oceans.

It’s like a holiday from the tribulations of real life. Perhaps that’s what it is that I hold so dear: the nostalgia of it all. The memories it evokes of being a small child, largely without worries, who truly believes in magic.

In a way, it’s bittersweet. The term ‘nostalgia’, first coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, was at the time regarded as a negative mental disorder. The word ‘nost’ borrows from the Greek word for ‘homecoming’ and the ‘algia’ is New Latin for ‘pain’. It was a feeling associated with soldiers who missed their families.

Our mother always made Christmas wonderful, no matter how unstable our childhood sometimes was. As an adult, especially when I’m having a hard time, I pine for those days. And Christmas takes me back.

If that makes me mad, so be it. Between now and December 26, you will find me skipping around, gleefully draping twinkling lights across every spare surface, humming Frank Sinatra songs, buying gifts and generally being the best version of myself.

After which it all goes horribly wrong. My kitchen calendar once again says ‘52 weeks until Christmas’ and it’s about to be New Year’s Eve: the most annoying, overrated, performative day of the year.