This year’s pile of catalogues began to insinuate their way into the house like snow in a snow-drift; one shiny cover at a time, tucked inside newspapers or hidden with other magazines, each one more festive and appealing than the last. Before you could say “jingle bells”, these slick marketing tools became required reading for my kids, aged four and five, to be examined as closely as a treasure map, argued over, hugged in bed and fiercely defended.

Within the space of a weekend, potential presents had been compared, agreed, rejected, exchanged and bargained over. Bedtime stories were built from pictures of Playmobil ghost pirates and Polly Pocket animal hospitals. My daughter, ever-organised, even marked up the glossiest catalogue with suggestions for Christmas and her birthday, colour-coded with different marker pens in case we hadn’t been paying enough attention to her hourly wish updates.

Top score in our house goes to the marketing whizz at Coop whose handy stickers - each showing a different ‘must have’ toy - even remove the need to put pen to paper to send that annual letter to Father Christmas. The neat little space provided for sticking in your chosen presents soon proved too small, with suggestions of presents for brother and friends spreading out like a mosaic across the full page-spread. Of course, this also helps if you’re not yet able to write to Santa; to a child who won’t formally learn to read or write until primary school, stickers are ideal - now there’s no need to miss out on that vital under-six market. And for the busy Mum-on-the-run, there’s nothing like an endless stream of sticky reminders - on books, bed-rails, lunchboxes - to focus your mind on the shopping season ahead and make sure you do not overlook those essential Christmas purchases.

In reality, the early arrival of Christmas has made shopping much less straight-forward. Both of our local supermarkets, Coop and Migros, have been no-go zones since the middle of October, when a small trickle of lebkuchen and tree decorations turned into a polar icecap of toys, food and general festive cheer. For some reason, this caught me off-guard - on turning into a new aisle, we were confronted with Lindt reindeer the size of Labradors and my quick shopping trip turned into an epic, ending in a struggle to prise dazzle-eyed children away from boxes of Lego larger than themselves, catalogue resolutions forgotten. Needless to say, LeShop and Coop Online will be getting a lot more business from me in the near future.

I shouldn’t really complain. Back in Britain, Christmas creeps further forward every year, with Santa wheeled out to replace summer barbeque displays in many high-street shops. But since we arrived in Switzerland in 2002, I’ve learnt to appreciate a more gradual approach to the seasons and the festivities they bring – just as summer gives way to autumn with misty mornings, harvest fairs and pumpkin displays make way for St Nicholas and Christmas markets with hot mugs of Glühwein and the first flakes of snow.

To be honest, I’m still a bit bewildered by my daughter’s new-found consumer savvy: “Mum, we have to get one of these. I don’t mind if I don’t get the talking cat – but I really really want the funny fighting guinea pigs”. Like lots of concerned parents, I’ve tried to keep the kids away from the demons of marketing, choosing advert-free comics and restricting TV to channels without commercials like CBeebies and KI.KA. But advertising really works, and our children’s fresh, enthusiastic imaginations are ready to embrace – and demand – whatever the Christmas consumer-fest throws our way.

As an ex-pat family I always feel that we’re a little divorced from Swiss culture, so for the kids these catalogues are shining beacons of what’s hot and what’s not, right here in their neighbourhood rather than back in a homeland that they’ve never really known. So thank you Franz Karl Weber, thank you Coop, and Kidoh, and Playmobil. Christmas is all planned out in our house. Now all we need to do is wait, and wait, and wait…

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