This is the season when the old nostalgia industry cranks itself up until you yearn for that simple time when there was no nostalgia at all and we got by on the mere thought that things might get better or that there might be new things which would be as good as the old things were. It was all phooey, of course. When you write a column you know there are no new things, just old things dressed up as new things - like the Christmas sports column with nothing to say for itself yet clumsily disguised as a meditation on the follies of the festive season.

You know, I often think that one of the great follies of the festive season is the tendency for good people to mentally round up their accounts and do all those things they meant to do during the year. As such, lots of readers like to put pen to festive paper and happy fingers to unforgiving keyboards and write to vocationally disadvantaged people such as myself and tell them what they think of us.

Bless them all for they are but one way of filling a Christmas column when the columnist is running on empty and staying away from the office lest he be asked to cover the GOAL Christmas Day Mile.

The typical Christmas epistle arrives at my desk in mid-January addressed to Tony Humphreys and telling me that for 12 years the sender has never missed my Tuesday StandingRoom Only column, that he thinks, credit where it is due, that I have brought a breath of hot air to my business, that my use of clichΘs has often been inventive if not downright novel and my careless scattering of apostrophes brought a touch of derring do sorely lacking in the works of better-educated writers. (At this point my attention is usually directed to some examples inpatiently underlined in red ink and attached to the note by means of furious stapling)

However, the correspondent will continue, the column of last Tuesday four weeks ago was multi-dimensional to the point of being something other than journalism. This thing, this offering, represented a new low in banality, a new height in vulgarity, counter-pointing as it did the sheer breadth of the author's spleen with the impossible narrowness of his mind. Most of these I re-address to poor Eoghan Harris.

Typically the note will conclude by informing me that I got my "dealing trick" out of the whole columns racket and it's time to move on and leave decent people to their lives, that I shouldn't let the door slap me arse on the way out. That kind of thing. Usually they are signed by somebody calling himself The Editor.

Normally it being Christmas Eve and everything, I would whip out an example of such a letter and publicly flog its author for the merriment of the rest of you. This being a rather Dickensian Christmas in Fleet Street we have been instructed to lay off the readers ("A reader is for life, not just for Christmas") and go heavy on the charming self-deprecation and, of course, the smug liberal, politically correct agenda which we are all paid to promote. (Readers who make it to the bottom of the column will find a free cut out and keep guide to the latest idea from the IT/Mao Orientation Camp. How to weave your own Cuban national soccer jersey using just hemp and muesli.)

However, columnists are also free to fall back upon other Christmas reliables. It costs nothing, says a memo from the finance people to make up a fanciful list of suitable gifts for well-known people. ("On no account are any of these gifts to be purchased however.") You know the sort of thing we mean here, Dear Santa, please bring Mick McCarthy a big smile to replace the one he lost when he got the job, and bring Ger Loughnane the grace to move on with his life and let Paidi ╙ SΘ lighten up and make Jonathan Woodgate retire and open a corner shop in Karachi, which gets terrorised by locals.

Really we could go on and on all night with the gift-giving mullarkey but I believe it leaves the readers' festive parsnips dry and unbuttered and the solemn promise of this column week after week is that it will butter your parsnips with not a second thought for your narrowing arteries. The gift thing needs a twist and for a while the quality control people suggested that all gift-giving columns be written in the form of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

The hilarity would thus be guaranteed as sports columnists would pretend to be the Minister for Sport receiving gifts from admirers. On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me, one drug test full of pristine pee, on the second day of Christmas by true love sent to me, two massive stadia both for Bertie, and so on it would go right through to the consultants' report on Abbotstown or twelve consultants a leaking. But Jim McDaid isn't an inherently comic figure, is he?

There's the usual hard-to-digest dry toast look back at the past 12 months which by convention must begin or end with the phrase "so that was the year that was." No way is this column above passing off a personal reminiscence of Ireland v Holland (say) as not just the greatest day ever but also the event which best summed up the times we live in. However, a quick glance at the calendar tells us that there is a New Year's Eve column to be written next week. Best keep the old powder dry.

I have always considered most suave and sophisticated the festive column full of quotes "we didn't get to hear". You know the sort of thing: "Yerra Tony won't mind a bit," Ger Loughnane to his publishers. "Alfie, I love you." Roy Keane to Alf Inge Haaland. "Of course, I meant all the nice things I said about you, Tom." John Bailey to Tommy Carr. But (as deftly illustrated above) when you get past the first couple, it really starts to struggle for air.

So, and here's a bitter irony, I have devised a new sort of Christmas Eve column, which captures the spiritual essence of Christmas but which reaches out in a nice politically correct diverse way yet still manages to entertain and inform the casual follower of sport.

Pressure of space, however, means that this groundbreaker must be held over till next year. There's something to look forward to. Have a good one.