Beware the heady days of Christmas are just around the corner.

This is a time where common sense often takes a holiday when it comes to how we spend our money as we all rebel against the boring existence we have to endure throughout the year, of the dreadful routine of waking up in the morning, going to work and coming back home to sleep like controlled sheep.

Come festive time, we want to forget that we are not as rich as we think we should be and had to work hard the whole year to save for the annual holiday. It is a time to play "pretend" with our budgets as we buy double groceries and all the goodies you can think of. Talk of hosting friends in our homes to try and feel alive and vibrant again.

The perils of debt can be preached from here to Timbuktu but people just go wild when the festive season starts. It is that something in the air which starts after Spring sheds off all the dry leaves and unleashes a riot of colours in our landscape. The streets of Pretoria, where I come from, would be turned into purple carpets because of the Jacaranda trees. Everywhere you drive, Mzansi has a character of flowers owning the hills and valleys - from proteas to sunflowers in full bloom.

We too want to be reborn, and if it takes that buying power at a retail store to help us achieve this, so be it.

What I used to love most about summers and festive seasons, when I was young, was buying Christmas clothes. My mom used to lay-bye the most trendy fashions for my sister and I just after winter, with shoes only bought later.

We would get so excited when my mom would take us to town to pay off the last instalment amount for us to take our clothes home. We would model our new outfits for my mom in the shops. After that she would buy us a big fat lunch of fish and chips with guava juice and we would find the nearest park to sit down and eat our bellies full.

We would also have sweets or chocolates to top up , thus I would leave the rest of my food for the pigeons in the park. I loved it when pigeons gathered around me as I fed them.

I thought that buying clothes for Christmas would be easier for us the modern day parents, but I actually find that the exposure to the internet has added to the shopping woes that we parents have to go through when shopping for Christmas clothes for our kids.

I have discovered many youngsters these days have a pretty good idea what they want before they step into the shops.

This, as you can imagine, often leads to long shopping expeditions with some ending in tears and tantrums, or with parents not talking to their children by the time they go home. Remember, our kids know what their idols and all the celebrities wear through their Instagram pages.

However, when they want to look like them, it becomes the parent's headache to shop for similar items even if they may not be exactly what the stars wear. Today's kids are more opinionated about their rights and choices. They have all the information at their fingertips.

You would scour several malls before you could satisfy their sophisticated tastes. Good luck if you have already started with that Christmas clothes shopping.

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