How will your Christmas shape up in 2011?

Spending

Recession be damned – the average family will splurge £700 on food, drink, presents and going out this Christmas. Each adult will spend an average of £128 on gifts, much of it online. Internet sales are up 16 per cent, while high street sales are down 2 per cent.

Yesterday, optimistically dubbed “Panic Saturday” by the retail sector, was thought to be the busiest shopping day of the festive season, with an estimated 11 million people stomping around town centres and shopping malls, spending £1 billion on leather gloves, celebrity biographies and selection boxes. Friday is the key day for food shopping as people pick up their chipolatas and parsnips. Online grocery delivery slots for the run-up to Christmas were booked up in October.

This is the first year that m-commerce – shopping via mobile phone – has made an impact. A consumer study for eDigitalResearch showed that 35 per cent of people did some Christmas shopping on their smartphones. These also make it much easier to use discount vouchers, Groupon deals and other money-saving offers which otherwise involve fiddling about with pieces of paper.

Eating and drinking

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a foodie sensation, and this year if you don’t have Heston’s pine sugar-dusted mince pies on the table you might as well serve an Iceland prawn ring. The molecular gastronomist has added rosewater, apple puree and lemon curd to his mincemeat, made the pastry case square and added a sachet of Christmas tree-scented sugar to sprinkle over the warm pies.

Waitrose had sold 75,000 before the end of November. Having already shifted 75,000 of last year’s must-eat, Blumenthal’s Christmas pudding with a whole candied orange in the middle, the store restocked in December. It has now sold out.

As an alternative dessert, both Tesco and Sainsbury’s have produced a mince pie ice-cream, free of rosewater but with chunks of pastry.

Turkey is still the most popular meat for Christmas dinner, with Mintel estimating that the UK will buy £307 million worth over the season. With a bumper crop of sprouts, there is no excuse for leaving them out. Novelty-seekers can even opt for a new red variety, on sale at Marks & Spencer.

Bailey’s Irish Cream sales, however, are on the decline. We only spent £226m on it last year, as opposed to £251m in 2009.

Going

The AA estimates that two-thirds of the cars in the UK – around 18 million – will be on the roads over the festive season. With Christmas falling on Sunday, traffic will be heavy all week, especially on trunk routes and around out-of-town shopping centres. Thursday and Friday will see the longest tailbacks. A survey of AA members found that 68 per cent planned to spend Christmas at home, with Geordies the least inclined to travel, and Londoners the keenest to get away. One in ten plan a journey of 100 miles or more. The train will also be feeling the strain, with up to four million passengers a day traversing the rail network over the next week.

Those who are not trekking 400 miles to sleep on an air mattress in a relative’s living room may be jetting off to the sun. Some 4.25 million Brits have booked holidays between 16 December and 3 January, up 250,000 on last year. Ski resorts in Canada, France and Eastern Europe are popular, as are sun traps Cuba, Mexico and the Canaries. A Facebook poll of British Airways customers favoured the Caribbean, with New York, Brazil and Cape Town in runner-up spots. While there, not everyone is mad to splash the cash. Another survey found that three-quarters of tourists are hunting down car hire deals and discount hotel rooms.

Giving

A mildly incontinent sausage dog, complete with its own pooper-scooper, is the surprise hot toy of the season. Doggie Doo (£22.99) is a game of chance in which players squeeze a plastic dachshund’s lead according to the roll of the dice. On each squeeze, the plasticine poop inches closer to the ground. This unbeatably child-friendly combination of cute dog and squidgy yellow poo have made it a runaway hit.

Fireman Sam’s Pontypandy Multi-Rescue Set (£29.99) is the nursery must-have, while the Moshling Tree House – a cool storage/home for Moshi Monster figures – will give great playground cred. Parents hoping to get ten minutes’ peace to play on their new iPads may have optimistically bought their toddlers a LeapPad Explorer (below, £79.99), a colourful tablet for kids which comes with its own games and apps. There is about as much chance of that as a chocolate Santa lasting past breakfast. Apple’s tablet (above, £300 and upwards) is still the market leader and the gift of choice for just about everyone between five and 50. The redesigned Kindle (£89) is smaller, neater and easier to use than the previous model, winning it a place on many doubters’ Christmas lists. Samsung’s Galaxy S II (around £500) is the most searched-for smartphone on the internet and will surely be delighting lots of the people who care about that kind of thing.

Boots, whose three-for-two offers, mighty points deals and hefty advertising spend make them a heavyweight festive player, have been in trouble for this year’s TV ad, portraying men as hopeless milksops who can’t be trusted to choose a Britney Spears branded fragrance without a crack team of ladies to help. Littlewoods has also caused a storm with ads that reveal Santa does not exist.

While the delivery of both messages may have led to distress, they underline the fact that women (not men of any description, never mind ones with long white beards) buy and wrap 80 per cent of all Christmas gifts.

Decorating

Blue, not a colour normally associated with Christmas, is having a moment. Cobalt lights twinkle in shop windows, periwinkle icicles dangle from branches. Traditionalists seeking a string of multicoloured, non-flashing, adornment-free fairy lights (as they were known in the old days) have a hunt on their hands.

Feathers (left) are the big newcomer on this year’s most modish trees, either in traditional game bird colours or highlighter-pen brights. Russian dolls are a bit last year, 2011 is all about the owl. Lurid tinsel pines, especially in novelty colours, are nowhere to be seen, although realistic fake trees are acceptable. Primark’s budget version of Paperchase’s glittery stags have been a recession triumph. Thanks to the Kirstie Allsopp-led trend to felt your own fairy cakes, handmade decorations are also highly sought after.

Watching

Last year’s Christmas Day viewing figures were the highest in a decade. Even without ITV’s Downton Abbey to unite the nation in a warm hug of nostalgic escapism, 15.8 million of us switched on the box. In 2011, the siren call of the roaring fire, Carson pouring the port and Lady Mary in a marabou-trimmed wrap may well give the commercial channel a ratings triumph. However, EastEnders, Doctor Who, Dickens spoof The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff and a blockbuster adaptation of Great Expectations, with Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham, may save the BBC’s blushes.

When Stephen Fry starts to grate – he’s in The Bleak Old Shop and a BBC adaptation of children’s classic The Borrowers – there is always that box set that Santa delivered (26 December is not called Boxing Day for nothing). This year’s top sellers are the complete Harry Potter films, Frozen Planet, The Inbetweeners series 1-3, Family Guy series 11, the complete Twilight and, of course, Downton Abbey. Adults who have already impressed the elves by taking their offspring to Arthur Christmas are allowed a night out at The Artist, the silent comedy that opens on 30 December and is already tipped for every gong going.

Sending

In the age of Facebook, Twitter and animated e-cards, even the festive text message to everyone in the address book is looking a little old hat. Rows and rows of glitter-encrusted cards, hanging above the fireplace from tiny pegs, are now the preserve of those who have not learned to thumb-type. Round-robin e-mails, complete with video clips of the twins’ violin duet, holiday snaps from Koh Samui and screen grabs of young Icarus’s award-winning blog have replaced the paper version.

Politicians and celebrities, however, need the glossy statement that only a printed card can bring: Ed Miliband and family in their M&S finery, Sam and Dave Cameron with a creepy face-painted child and Nick Clegg’s snowman family (above) as drawn by his sons Antonio and Alberto. Joan Collins is sending out a flattering fashion sketch of her lovely self stretched out on a red sofa. Digital channel Comedy Central’s hokey-looking card bears the legend “Peace & Joy 1993”. Inside it says: “Comedy Central is committed to recycling.”

What the Royal Mail has lost in card postage it has made up for with the explosion of online shopping. They have named Derby as the UK’s internet gift-buying hotspot, followed by Cambridge, Lincoln and Stockton-on-Tees. They will deliver two billion items of mail over the festive season, including 600,000 packages and cards a day going to friends and family overseas.

Wearing

Do not make the mistake of thinking it is possible to pick up something vaguely festive from Florence & Fred while collecting the crackers in Tesco. According to the experts, assembling a Christmas look requires more forward planning than a royal wedding.

Vogue advises playing with hemlines and teaming a maxi skirt with a favourite jumper (illustrated with a Dries Van Noten sweater that looks as if a dog has slept on it), switching peep toes for ankle boots, layering friendship bracelets around a gentleman’s gold watch and throwing a fur gilet over the top “for an effortlessly cool touch”.

For men, the bolder will be experimenting with last year’s sensation, the “onesie” (right). Basically a giant babygro, this celebrity favourite is now available to us civilians via Primark. The novelty Christmas sweater, as worn so endearingly by Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary, is having a moment for both sexes. At the tasteful end of the spectrum there are endless versions of The Killing star Sarah Lund’s Fair Isle number and other cheery Nordic-looking woolies. Then there is a Ralph Lauren sweater costing £345, which Sam Lobban, menswear buyer at Selfridges, describes as “a navy roll-neck with Fair Isle patterning across the upper chest and cuff as well as a giant moose in a mountain scene. Possibly the best jumper ever.”