H OW soon is it acceptable to start putting up the Christmas decorations?

Decking the halls with boughs of holly was always Mrs Hextol’s province when I was at work, but my first Christmas since retiring has put a different perspective on things.

I have always sneered at shops who have the trees up and Christmas cards on the shelves by the October half term, and much as I love Noddy Holder, hearing his Brummy bawling long before Bonfire Night has always grated.

But this year, with time on my hands, I have hunted out the tinsel, baubles and other festive paraphernalia long before I would normally have regarded as being decent.

It started out as a bid to establish which of our many thousands of coloured lights are still in working order.

They were all working when they were stowed away in the back of the garage last January, but bitter experience has taught me that bored Christmas elves like nothing better than whiling away the summer by blowing bulbs and severing wires.

Finding the decorations took the best part of a morning, as it involved moving all manner of other things to get to the back of the garage.

Bicycles for all ages, a bag of cement which may well have set, a set of golf clubs that haven’t seen action since 1992 and a bag of fishing tackle, including a forgotten clutch of worms, all had to be excavated before the suitcases containing the lights could be located.

The omens were good, for the first thing I dragged out was the fibre optic tree, purchased for a song from Robbs at Tynedale Park while that much-missed emporium was in its death throes.

When demummified from its many protective layers of bin bags, the ancient tree was soon bathing the house in its flickering beams of many colours.

Fortified by this Christmas miracle, I returned to the garage refreshed, and managed to winkle the festive suitcases out from under the flotsam and jetsam, and wheeled them into the conservatory in triumph – only to be ticked off by Mrs Hextol for sullying her newly- mopped floor with unwashed suitcase wheels.

Feeling like Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings, I eventually managed to coax the cases open to expose the glittering treasures therein – a veritable pythons’ nest of tangled wires and coloured bulbs, accompanied by a rather worrying shower of loose bulbs and gaudy plastic covers.

After several hours, I had managed to untangle one full set of lights, and when I plugged them in, lo and behold, they burst into life in what I felt was a fair imitation of Fenwick’s Window.

As they flashed and twinkled, Mrs Hextol nodded approvingly, and said they would look lovely festooned around the rowan tree at the bottom of the garden.

I was aghast, for while our modest mountain ash is no giant sequoia, it is tall enough to give me a nosebleed even thinking about getting anyway near its topmost branches.

My protests cut little ice, and I was soon wobbling precariously on top of a stepladder, winding the string of lights in and out of the branches in as artistic a manner as I could muster.

It soon became apparent that bright though they were, they would be lost among the branches, and I had to start the painful process of taking them all down again.

But then I had the brainwave of wrapping the lights around the trunk of the tree, providing a column of light that would dazzle and delight through the festive season.

I had to unplug them before winding them round and round the tree in loops as precisely placed as the ranks of the Grenadier Guards at the Trooping of the Colour, and I was warmly congratulating myself on a job well done – until I plugged them in again after dragging Mrs Hextol away from the oven to admire my handiwork.

The 800 lights remained resolutely unilluminated, even after vigorous plug jiggling and a round of most unfestive cursing.

However, a further rummage in the case revealed an identical set of lights, and just as I was about to start unwinding the old lights and replacing them with the new set, Mrs Hextol said brightly: “Why don’t you just switch the transformers from one set to the other to see if that’s the problem, rather than the lights themselves?”