My family Christmas has got a lot better since we stopped giving presents | Nell Frizzell

Since we don't spend December shopping and wrapping any more, we give each other the gift of time instead

There is no greater gift than never again having to walk into an overheated, Wham-blasting shopping centre full of animatronic reindeer and the smell of damp hair, to spend 20 on a pot plant that nobody has asked for nor, in all probability, wants. To never again hear Noddy Holder shouting across the shop floor as you dither between shaving soap and another brown leather wallet. To never again try to bring four rolls of non-recyclable wrapping paper home on the packed bus.

Which is why, in my immediate family, we do not swap presents at Christmas. My mother, my sister, my father, my partner and my child: none of us get each other Christmas presents. It's been an agreement for the last few years and, all being well, one that will hold water again this festive season. But it would be unfair to say we don't actually give each other things. We may not buy things, wrap things, put things under a tree or push anything but a hairy toe into a stocking on Christmas Eve but that's not to say we don't give gifts. Instead we bestow upon each other the treats of time, saving money, the weekends in the run-up to Christmas at home, sanity, and evenings not clogged with sticky tape and phone calls and online checkouts. You may think these are rambling attempts at optimism from a Scrooge but I really believe that, by taking presents out of the equation, I have given my family back almost the whole of December to spend as they wish.

Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years