ANYONE else sick to death at the sight of those shelves of gifts for a tenner that seem to be everywhere at this time of year?

Just imagine a warm summer's day, buyers huddled over a catalogue to select this year’s Christmas range of personality-free gifts to cater for the harried and unimaginative. Sure, it’s perfectly possible that one dark late-autumn evening person A has a moan to person B about how difficult it is to find the keyhole on the car door at night and person B has an aha moment.

But let’s face it, the likelihood that anyone gets a LED key fob and thinks ‘wow, I now feel less alone in the world’ is pretty remote.

Because at its best, gift giving does just that. If you have ever found or received the perfect gift you know what a buzz that moment of discovery and mutual delight is.

The really spot-on presents – either for an occasion or ‘just because’ have the power to make us feel understood and cared for. Someone not only thought of you but also has you sussed well enough to find something especially meaningful to you. And the giver has the pleasure of making someone happy.

Of course the gift itself is only one bit of the experience – the context of who is doing the giving to whom and under what circumstances is key to where the gift falls in the range of possible sentiments, as a means of cultivating obligation or showing wealth or a way to show love or gratitude or both.

To this list of gift giving scenarios we must now add the modern invented ones such as the end-of-year present for your child's teacher.

As members of that modern class of recipients for obligatory and mostly arbitrary gifts, teachers must have cupboards bursting with scented soaps and fancy shower gel. Then again they probably pool them to sell at the summer fete.

At this time of year it’s the host gift that gets ‘recycled’. Those shortbreads in the pretty tin might as well be on a conveyor belt moving toward a zero-sum exchange. We can’t always have a jar of homemade chutney to hand or find time to select just the right thing but I wonder if it’s not better to come empty-handed and make a grander gesture next time.

Easier said than done, isn’t it?

What will I bring for the hostess of that festive lunch on Saturday?

I’ve never even met her and have a mountain of things to do between now and then.

The more I think about that to-do list, the better that display of personality-free gifts looks.