Can you feel the panic rising?
'Tis the season to spend, spend, spend so you better get started.
As reported on Friday, in the Bay of Plenty - population 308,000 - we spend around $6 billion a year in the retail sector.
According to the World Bank, this amount is roughly the same as the GDP of Rwanda - population 12 million - last year.
So we're no strangers to the shops at any time, but Christmas is something else.
A glorious annual festival of consumerism driven by good intentions and guilt in equal measure.
In just two days last Christmas - December 22 and 23 - people in the Bay of Plenty swiped $30.1m worth of purchases through eftpos machines, up 1.4 per cent on the previous year.
A candy cane-coated carnival of gifts, booze and exotic ingredients for that Instagram-worthy grazing platter.
I love being with my family for the holidays and I don't mean to be grinchy, but the creeping cost of Christmas gives me a hollow feeling.
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Unless you're a little kid, all the gift-giving mostly seems to leave behind credit card debt and an unsettling feeling that you really don't know any of the people you love, and they don't know anything about you.
What vibes were you putting out that made your sister/colleague/Santa think you'd like that novelty T-shirt/unnecessarily specific kitchen gadget/baffling book? You'll never know. But you're obliged to seem grateful.
We do this dance every year because it's the done thing and also a handy opportunity to write off a few unnecessary (but fun! Fun-necessary!) purchases as Christmas gifts to ourselves. Thanks for the new sunglasses, me.
Every now and again you strike gold and manage to give or receive just the right thing to someone else. It's an unrivalled joy that people pleasers can hold close and use to reassure themselves of their gift-giving prowess for years after.
But can it ever make up for all the unused foot spas and overpriced toiletries left to curdle in a forgotten drawer?
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Here's another interesting statistic: For the fifth year in a row, New Zealand households spent more than they earned, according to Stats NZ data released this week.
Disposable income - money after expenses available to spend, save or invest - is up but it is not enough. We saved less and spent more than we made to the tune of about $340 per household per year.
This Christmas, let's all just calm down a bit. Wind the expectations of the event down a few notches.
Let's build festive traditions around how we spend our time together, not how we splash our cash.
