Christmas comes but once each year.

If you’re lucky, that is.

You may have noticed the subtle low-key arrival of the Christmas TV advertising campaign at the end of September.

The old joke about Santa Claus only having a part-time job is likely to become obsolete.

I can foresee the day when the job description on the application form will include four weeks’ annual holidays.

Christmas is now such a long drawn out affair it won’t be long before the top job becomes full-time.

The advertising for this year’s ’must haves’ has started to drop a few hints for gift of the year.

At least it will make a change from watching the adverts for sanitary products for women with leaky bladders.

I’m sure that having a leaky bladder must be an absolute nuisance but I would have thought if you were a woman and you had inconvenient problems of this type, you would already know where to buy the necessary products.

But this really is beginning to lead in directions that I have no wish to go, so we’ll change the subject before it’s too late.

We’ve spoken many times about my job in a family business in Strand Street.

We were watchmakers and jewellers and the Christmas shopping spree was without doubt our busiest time of the year.

I can well remember the golden days of retailing, long before the arrival of catalogue shopping and a lifetime before what was to be known as internet or online shopping.

We were innocents who lived in a vacuum.

Were we in for a surprise?

Now, in any job, there will be many things that can go wrong, and there might be something that you suddenly remember that will make your blood turn cold.

This is what happened to me, or rather what happened to a very understanding, innocent customer.

It was a week or so before Christmas and the excitement of eager customers was building up nicely.

I remember one particular customer who had been working in the island and had been enticed into our shop by our window display to buy a Christmas present for his wife.

He was a Scotsman who lived on the outskirts of Glasgow and I can still remember him now.

I remembered the watch that he chose, and I remember gift wrapping the little parcel and finishing it off with a ribbon bow.

I thanked him for his business, we shook hands, wished each other a happy Christmas and that was that.

That year, Christmas Day fell on a Saturday.

We finished work on the Friday, closed the shop for a four-day break and re-opened on the following Wednesday. The phone was ringing when I opened the door.

It was a very annoyed and , worse, a very disappointed customer.

He was calling from his home on the outskirts of Glasgow.

He also had a very disappointed wife.

She had been given a little gift wrapped parcel, finished with a ribbon bow.

There was only one problem, I had carefully wrapped up an empty box.

At least I had solved one little puzzle.

When the customer had left the shop and I was putting the remaining watches back into the display case, I had discovered that I had one watch left over.

I put it carefully to one side to re-box when I had time to locate the missing box.

Every other watch matched up with it’s display box.

The mystery was solved.

The lonely watch was re-boxed and on its way to Glasgow within the hour.

I never saw either him or the watch again.

I wonder did his wife suffer from a leaky bladder?

Some time ago Pullyman - aka Michael Cowin - was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, a condition that affects people in different ways. Michael discovered writing and Island Life is featuring some of his musings. Sometimes topical, sometimes nostalgic, read about life as seen through the eyes of Pullyman