MOST of the year I’m Mother Hubbard, with cupboards bare enough to shock a naturist. Yet Christmas is only one day and I’m planning ahead with my festive food shop, stuffing every spare space in the house with enough goodies to feed the entire cast of a pantomime, Jamie-Oliver style, for a two-month run.

With this rich haul of mince pies, Turkish delight and pickled onion chutney, I’m secure in the knowledge that if it we are snowed in on Christmas Eve, besieged by Russians trying to come in from the cold, or engulfed in a Christmas groundhog day, then the children will not starve before New Year.

With a squirrel’s hoard of nuts that would worry the fiercest nutcracker doll; a cheeseboard groaning under the weight of eight maids a-milking; and enough chocolate to disrupt the entire county’s Weight-Watching programme, one things’s for certain: we won’t be Walking In The Air with Aled Jones.

And talking of rounder than the proverbial robin, walking through Summertown this week in a Hamptons window there’s a lovely display of a team of jolly Father Christmases by children from St Aloysius Primary School.

These Santas may just be researching chimney shapes for the big night ahead, but I’m hoping they’re browsing with me in mind, and plan to jam a conservatory or en-suite under the tree on Christmas Eve. I would also consider a mortgage on a gingerbread house if Hansel and Gretel were thinking of relocating, perhaps to a stage with low ranking celebrities.

You may think I’m crackers, but I love pantomime: it’s a great Christmas tradition in this country, set around some fairytale or other.

Obviously it must include several bizarre cross-dressing cast members whom, if you came across them in a procession to celebrate freedom of expression, would have you moving your children swiftly on in case a black-leatherwear-and-whips float was next round the corner. But on stage it’s all good family fun served with sauce and multi-layered bloomers.

Instead of Childline, there’s a fairy godmother. There’s always a handy prince (or princess) to stop the neglected heroine (or hero) having to endure the horrors of the lonely hearts ads. And last but not least, some Slytherin baddie will be kicked off stage by a two-man horse, chased into oblivion by an exploding sausage or pecked to death by a partridge in a pear tree. What’s not to like?

So with great excitement this week I am taking the children to the Oxford Playhouse’s Mother Goose served, surely, with a golden egg and I’m certain it will have all the trimmings.

Oh no it won’t! OH YES IT WILL!