THERE'S SOMETHING about the Christmas spirit - or perhaps in it - that turns the human brain into mistletoe mush. Now comes a suggestion that children be turned loose to shop for Yuletide presents on their own. And while you are about it, send the rabbit out for a head of lettuce and tell your cat he can baby-sit the mouse at New Year's.

Jane Furnival, a shopping adviser in London, says that letting the kiddies choose their own gifts for others teaches them the fine art of shopping, and that Christmas is an especially good time for field expeditions. This strikes me as akin to instructing knife murderers in how best to hone the family cutlery.

In the realm of rational thought, her suggestion ranks right up there with the advice given recently to NASA scientists, to the effect that when it comes to landing a robot on the planet Mars, an inch is as good as - well, certainly no different from - a centimeter.

Befuddled by being spoken to in both good old English imperial measures and Frenchified metrics (another of Bonaparte's silly notions, along with carrying on a long French tradition of starting and losing wars), the Mars lander promptly went doolally and set about trying to soft-land three miles or so (five kilometers) under the desert. That's what fool advice gets you.

Jane Furnival's view is that Christmas shopping is an excellent way to teach overgrown ankle biters a degree of fiscal responsibility at an early age. How else," she asks - and with nary a sign of tongue in cheek - "do they learn skills such as imagining what someone might like and buying within a budget?"

Well, giving a brat a budget seems to me about as productive as giving my cat Currant Bun a first-edition copy of Kepler's laws of celestial mechanics and asking him to plot me a course to a decent pub on Pluto. If anything, the cat has a marginally better chance of success.

Furnival herself concedes that things could backfire, and she cites the tale of the child who presented his aunt with a centipede at the Christmas breakfast table. (Considering aunts I have known, this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but then, we are not talking here about justice and justifiable terror.)

"It's tempting to buy something 'from little Johnny' without consulting Johnny at all," she goes on, suggesting - in fact, flatly stating - that "children's ideas of a good present will be better than yours." My considered opinion is that little Johnny is quite likely to go out and buy his best pal a Do-It-Yourself Guillotine Kit and offer up his sister as practice material. And he will still need your help wrapping it all and tying on a ribbon and bow.

Jane, however, is nothing if not determined. This year, she is sending out her 12-year-old to do his own Christmas shopping by himself for the first time. I assume she has sealed her purse with superglue, lodged the credit cards in a bank depository with six-foot thick steel walls and taken out insurance against bankruptcy.

There's more: "Before this rite of passage," she says, "you must prime a child to be assertive, or the shop assistant will assume they are in some grown-up's entourage and ignore them." In my own experience, urging a kid to more self-assertion is about as necessary as encouraging Attila the Hun's troops to sack, burn and pillage.

The Furnivals had a practice run-through at home, with rehearsals in change-giving and, of course, more on the budget front. It turned out that the kid was planning to spend the equivalent of 150 bucks on toys for his brother. Actually, he had only about $50, but that's not the point that struck me: With 150 bucks, I would have been a lot more imaginative, like buying my brother a one-way ticket to the Belgian Congo.

Jane has another excuse - pardon me, practical reason - for this "Christmas shopping as a way to prepare for life's challenges" business: "Girls need to develop the self-discipline so horribly necessary to not just give things they themselves like."

I would applaud that, except that from what I've seen over six decades or so, no amount of training - be it at the age of six, 16, 60 or a biblical 600 - is ever going to instill any sense of "self-discipline" in the shopping habits of females. Witness the three closets full of clothes my wife says she needs for the various seasons. Presumably, she means those on Mars and Jupiter and the asteroid belt as well as the four on Earth.

Jane Furnival also insists that "men are bad enough at leaving the buying to women, so we mustn't encourage a new generation." Bah, humbug, as old Ebenezer would say. My wife Elizabeth, in fact, trusts me enough to give me my own shopping cart to buy what I wish on our big pre-Christmas invasion at the local Sainsbury's supermarket.

She pays the tab on this particular seasonal shopping trip, and she was more than pleased that last year I spent only about $40 or so. But I was caught by surprise, and this time I'm planning a different tactic - starting with a 36-hour fast ahead of the journey (and she'll have to drive to the store because I will be too weak).

Elizabeth insists I am an "overgrown, eccentric kid." Maybe so, but you won't find me fiddling with any fool budget worries when - emaciated though I may be, and leaning on the trolley and munching a Mars bar for fuel - I nevertheless zip down those Sainsbury's aisles, showing one and all how Christmas grocery shopping really should be done.

Thought for the Week: It's not the pace of life that is of concern - it's the sudden stop at the end.

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