Up and down the country, the happy cries of the home-made gifter can be heard for miles around. “Put it in a Kilner jar. Delicious! Easy, takes two minutes. Everyone is thrilled!”

“It’s no harder than making a white sauce, if you know what you’re doing!”

“Just a handful of herbs from the allotment. Seven or eight quid in the shops, and to me it’s free!”

So, well, it’s finally hit. Home-made present-giving, not as a lifestyle choice, but as a national edict from the Church of Stop Shopping, because your credit card is maxed out, because your mortgage is costing more than it did, and because, frankly, it’s time to wrest control of muslin-wrapped beeswax candles with handwritten labels from the trendy boutique down the road, which has been fleecing its customers for them ever since it opened in the late 1990s.

This more abstemious Christmas has a new flavour to it, and for me it will be scissors, ribbon, poster paint, cups of tea at home, Classic FM and not feeling guilty or broke.

That is what I’m planning anyway — and loudly. Don’t think I haven’t told everyone who’ll listen. There is a peculiar mix of piety and grandiosity attached to loving hands at home.

Turns out — and I’m not even sure how I feel about this — that several of my friends have been doing it for aeons and I never even knew. Take my friend Hanna, who made a Ziggy Stardust poster for a friend that evolved into an internationally renowned music ’zine. She says, and I agree with her, that making gifts is far more “sincere”. Or Tamara, who “always does” bubble bath, body creams and sun-dried tomatoes, and this year scored herself an allotment, so now there’s apple bread.

Or Tiffany, whose speciality is lavender salts. (“Some essential oils and a bag of granular salt from the supermarket. Add the oil to the salts, put it in a pretty jar, stick on your label and there you go. It takes possibly five minutes.”) And Lily, who this year is preparing tokens containing promises to spend more time with her loved ones, a gesture of generosity that brings a lump to all of our throats, since Lily is famously disinclined to give much thought to anyone she isn’t shagging.

How proud I am of them all. This Christmas, these clever souls will be revelling in the cosy feeling of having got it just right.

But have they? Are presents that cost nothing, or almost nothing, the antidote to Christmas anomie they are supposed to be, or are they just pretend?

I have been thinking about this and have come out on the side of the former. The post-crunch hot spot in Islington is the Make Lounge, a glossy, newish set-up where local mummies go to do papier-mâché (catchphrase: “Credit crunch? Make it a handmade holiday!”), and never a jollier bunch could you meet.

And the other day, I dropped by my local drinking den to pick up a jacket left there the night before, and who’d have thought it? The place had been transformed into a makeshift pottery workshop. There were only three people in there, but from their beatific smiles you’d have thought that Santa himself had just dropped by.

Cosy and heartwarming it may be, but one thing the home-made gifter also knows is that making things is never really free. As anyone who has ever tried to make anything will tell you, Blue Peter’s Law dictates that by the time you’ve bought the raw materials and cocked it all up a few times, you could have afforded to get the same thing in Harrods.

That isn’t the point, though. The point is that every moment you spent sticking miscellaneous vintage buttons onto sheets of felt, and your fingers, you were thinking about someone else besides yourself.

Which leaves just one question: will the recipients of your creations actually want what you’ve made them? My friend Tiffany thinks not: “They say they do, but secretly they’re quite scornful and would prefer things that are posh from a shop.”

The home gifter pays no heed to this. The home gifter knows what’s right for her giftees better than they even know themselves.

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