We are hurtling towards Christmas, and once again the annual challenge is looming over us like one of Scrooge’s ghosts. Yes, while normal people fret about wrapping paper and final posting dates for Antipodean parcels, we are again all in a lather about The Shed.

Faced with two weeks’ annual leave, we have the choice of staring at James Stewart films while skilfully guiding Belgian chocolates from the box to the mouth – my preferred option – or putting the entire fortnight to good use by sorting out the shed – my husband’s choice.

Sorting out the shed is such a well-established concept in our house, requiring such expert planning and well-honed spatial skills.

It hangs around the fact that our shed is (a) full of rubbish, and (b) according to the laws of physics, which in my experience tend to take precedence over silent pleas and crossed fingers, is on the point of disintegrating at any moment.

The Shed Theory is that we dump the rubbish, bring the good stuff into the kitchen temporarily, dismantle the shed without procuring a corporate manslaughter conviction courtesy of the Health and Safety Executive. However, in the past we have faced hurdles that have prevented the expedition from going ahead.

One year it was too windy. Another year it was too cold. And last year the television schedule proved simply too attractive, so when my husband started to put his foot down and turned the telly off I simply moved to Base Camp One upstairs, slipped under the duvet and feigned Man Flu.

This year, though, there’s a steely glint of resolve in his eye – or maybe it’s a bit of paint that’s flaked off the shed wall. He is going to empty the shed himself before Christmas, sort out the rubbish from the salvageable, and then once the turkey carcass has begun showing early signs of salmonella we can roll up our sleeves and dismantle it board by board. Hurrah.

I nod and smile encouragingly. But without a hint of irony or sarcasm. For he has just spoken the words that have sealed the shed’s fate for the next year at least. He will sort out the rubbish from the salvageable.

My husband is from a clan that cannot bear to throw away anything. My father-in-law used to drive around in a Ford Anglia that had a garage door handle welded on to its boot. His iron had a hotplate that hailed from an earlier era and was an inch wider than the iron itself, so you couldn’t press a shirtsleeve without taking either half a cuff or a finger-width of skin with you as you edged towards the shoulder. And it’s in the genes.

After a weekend of toiling in the shed, he’s made great progress. There’s a wood chipper that is now in pieces on the floor, and if only we had kept the original instructions could almost certainly be repaired and reconstructed to turn excess branches into mulch. It’s potentially viable, but too oily to sit on the kitchen floor.

Then there’s the hedge trimmer. This again has mysteriously stopped working, and a cross-threaded screw means it is impossible to open up to scrutiny, but it would be a waste to send it to the waste electricals recycler. It, too, can’t really sit in the kitchen – it would petrify the turkey, for a start – so it’s going to have to remain in the shed. He doesn’t quite know how to tell me this, but we may have to keep the shed up for a while after all.

I take the news well, for I don’t quite know how to tell him this, but we haven’t won £5,000 on the Premium Bonds this month, either. It looks like another Christmas of black and white films and dark and milk chocolate.

What a pain, he says.

What a wonderful life, I say, but not out loud.