All of which is wonderful and very good for the economy. But The Holly and the Ivy has a deeper, simpler, more powerful magic. It speaks of the old ways, the ancient villages, a rural English Christmas before the John Lewis Christmas ad, before Santa, even before Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for most of my adult life. That’s the English Christmas I miss. So, that’s the one I decided to go looking for.

The quest began on the motorway that runs south from London to Brighton, aka London-by-the-Sea.

You need to get off the motorway and go backwards in time. A satnav – or a map and some common sense – can act as a guide along high-hedged country roads that thread their way across the Weald. As you weave between the chalky South Downs and hidden valleys you are already in the droveways of a much older England.

A short detour brings you to Ashdown Forest. This is where you want to be on a frosty morning around Christmastime for the full Holly and the Ivy experience. It was a favoured hunting ground for English kings and queens from Norman times onwards: if there is one place you are guaranteed to see the running of the deer, it’s Ashdown. (But many visitors, especially from Asia, come in search of a different kind of animal: a small bear called Winnie the Pooh, whose creator, AA Milne, lived here in the 1920s.)

From here, we head to Brighton. It’s Christmas: we shop.

Even in this most progressive and hip of English cities, you can find traces of the ‘irregular market town’ this once was before the piers, Pavilion and Premiership football.

The Lanes are a warren of narrow streets much loved by antique dealers; where you can plausibly pretend you’re looking for a present for your wife in, say, 1793.

At Baroque Bespoke Jewellery I pick up a pair of ‘Brighton Rocks’ gold and diamond ear studs, designed and made on the premises.

The Englishman’s home is his castle. And at Christmas, that home is likely to be a modern suburban house with a four-metre-long decoration of Santa and his sleigh taking up most of the frontage.

We wanted a proper castle. West of Brighton, happily, there is one.

Amberley is the real thing – portcullis, 18-metre-tall walls, muster of peacocks – and has been around since the 1300s. Now it houses a hotel with 19 bedrooms, whose mullioned windows and antique furnishings murmur ‘quintessentially English’.