Happiness, like love, is one of life's ineluctable mysteries. We all want it, but are not quite sure what it is until we wake up one day and realise that happiness was the smell of other people's Sunday lunches when we were coming out of Church, or the smell of Christmas which was hard to compete with in the feel-good department. Growing up, Christmas always had a special smell - a mixture of expensive wrapping paper, After Eight mints and a hint of cedar, or maybe it was pine.

When you're nine, sitting in some slipway in Xemxija or on a rock at Għar Qawqla eating bambinella, surrounded by the family you may secretly feel are cramping your style, in some recess of your mind you convince yourself that all your happiness cheques are being postdated to a time when you will be old enough to fly to Paris alone. Until the day you find yourself staring up at the very imposing Eiffel Tower, and you are all alone. Which is when the truth comes home to roost: that you were probably your happiest when you were waiting for your future to happen. All the time, while you were putting your happiness on hold, it was right there in your back garden.

Not sure where all this nostalgia is coming from. Maybe I've woken up to too many vaguely familiar faces the past few months, breakfast-show guests, people I haven't seen since I was nine and a Crusader, telling me all about starter packs and the impact the euro is going to have on my life. Or maybe it's because Christmas is here.

Which is why I will not be writing about the election, all the politicians who seem to be coming out of the woodwork planting seeds of their electoral campaign in your letterbox, inbox or on your cheeks as they feel the need to cross to the other side of carpeted Republic Street to kiss you and make sure you are well. Neither will I be writing about Lou Bondì, his polka dot ties, busy shirts, Larry King braces and his guest list which fall short of Mr King's. We don't get to see Warren Beatty in his studio. We're stuck with the likes of Philip Beattie. Which is when you begin to understand the real meaning of 'Where's Everybody?'

I think I'll save anything that smacks of vituperative for next year and stick with the safe stuff - like Christmas and childhood. The thing about having children is that you get to go through the motions of childhood all over again, with the benefit of hindsight and, more importantly, of Google. And in a weird sort of way, you begin to understand yourself better. Seeing my son struggle with Maths concepts I still find myself struggling with, puts lots of things about myself into perspective and reinforces my life-long conviction that the reason we take Maths is to prepare ourselves for the real world. Maths is life's soothsayer; the first slap in the face of childhood - an honest predictor of the bumpy road that lies ahead.

We're all dying to grow up and leave what we think is the waiting room to real life behind. But in the process we also leave something else behind - the self-assurance that belongs exclusively to the young. However tough one's childhood, children are blessed with a thickness of skin, a sense of entitlement which can all too easily be lost on the road to adulthood. They neither have the time nor the inclination toward self doubt. I sit down to seemingly straightforward True or False comprehensions with my son and what is very True or very False to him, appears strangely dubious to me. And I resist the temptation to send his teacher yet another note in his diary about how there is no right or wrong answer to question three.

And when we get to the age when people stop asking us what we want to be 'when we grow up' because, voilà, we have grown up, then we dig up memories which we didn't think we would ever want to, less so need to, remember.

Christmas comes once a year, but for most it is a journey back to a sacred place which in all likelihood may not have existed in the way we may deliberately choose to remember it now. Although I certainly remember feeling my Christmases were somehow grander and my stocking more bulging than anyone else's. And as I watch my son painstakingly writing letters and striking invisible deals with Santa, I only hope he feels the same sense of entitlement to all that is grand, beautiful and dripping in kudos, that I did as a child.