That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
Some of our more endearingly daft householders will, by this time tomorrow, have removed the Halloween tombstones from their front gardens and replaced them with reindeer, Santas, angels and twinkling lights.
The great annual sacrifice to the gods of consumerism - otherwise known as Christmas - will be well and truly under way.
For men, it's an odd time of year. Some of us will be seen braying loudly in pubs giving every impression that we are enjoying ourselves. Yet the drinking may serve only to cover up the anxieties surrounding Christmas. These include shopping, whose house to go to on Christmas day and what to buy the woman in your life.
A few years ago, a London shopping centre commissioned a psychologist to study stress levels in men while they were shopping.
He monitored their blood pressure, heart beat and the level of stress hormones in their bodies. What he found were levels of stress comparable to those experienced by policemen in riot situations. Women, meanwhile, didn't even experience a blip above normal.
These stress levels, though, fell away when men were shopping for toys such as computers, musical equipment, electronic organisers and such like. It was the boring, everyday stuff that stressed them out.
The problem with Christmas, however, is that far from shopping for toys for boys you will be searching for something more elusive - that mysterious something which will be deemed acceptable by your mate.
Left to ourselves, we simply do not know what will please our wives or partners. Buying clothes, for instance, is out of the question - we will get it wrong and become objects of pity on Christmas morning.
Kitchen equipment or a new vacuum cleaner is likely to get us hit over the head.
The only solution is to actually ask your other half what she wants and then send her off to buy it. If she is the prudent sort, she may well decide to wait for the January sales, which is grand.
Except that if she's waiting for the sales, you're still going to have to buy her a little something for Christmas Day - something actually picked out by yourself. But what is that something to be? All I can suggest is that you buy her that DVD you've always wanted and a box of chocolates and hope for the best.
All this, in some families, is nothing compared to the dilemma over whose parents to go to for Christmas Day.
Christmas is a time when men are particularly prone to display symptoms of mammy syndrome. Men afflicted by this condition are convinced that mammy will not survive the day unless she has the pleasure of cooking for golden boy in her own home.
Trouble is, your spouse may also have a mammy and may even be unreasonable enough to want to go to her for every second Christmas.
In some families, this dilemma is more or less incapable of being resolved. This is especially so if the mammy is into emotional blackmail. I mean the sort who will sigh, "Sure, I haven't that many Christmases left in me anyhow and you can eat where you like when I'm gone."
The answer to that statement, I would suggest, could be something along the lines of, "We hope you'll be around for a very long time indeed and that we'll have many more Christmases together but this year we're going to eat at home."
Normal mammies, though - and this is what golden boys so often fail to understand - may well be relieved at not having to cook yet another Christmas dinner for their children and their children's spouses.
The best way to escape the "whose house" dilemma is to go to Lanzarote for Christmas.
The problem is the flights are probably already booked out by Paddys and Marys determined to escape family conflict.
So you'll have to do the best you can for now and book early next year.
Meanwhile, may I be among the first to wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas?
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.