THE TRUE MAGIC of Christmas is its uncanny ability to render an entire population tone-deaf and to turn schlock into expensive baubles. There's something about the season that sends common and other senses off on a lengthy vacation to Tierra del Fuego along with big chunks of our sanity.

If instead of Christmas it were May 23, suggesting that the Teletubbies screeching "Say Eh-Oh" was the musical hit of the season and that someone could seriously consider paying $282,000 for a champagne bucket would make you eligible for the butterfly nets and a long stay at the state home for the bewildered.

In my experience, it hasn't always been that way. The Christmases of my youth were spent painstakingly learning the words to "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" at the Harmony Hall orphanage and announcing the onslaught of puberty at Second Methodist Church by cracking on the high note of the "Myrrh is mine" verse of "We Three Kings of Orient Are."

Pop Christmas songs were relatively minor events, except for Bing Crosby's "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." Then it all went pear-shaped, starting with one of the worst songs in musical history, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," for which Gene Autry should have been hung up by his spurs.

It has been downhill ever since, with "Good King Wenceslas" replaced by "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," "Oh, Tannenbaum" giving way to "Rockin' Round the Christmas Tree" and "Joy to the World" trumped by "There's No One Quite Like Grandma" as rendered by the St. Winifred's School Choir.

Christmas shopping already is a grim enough business, resembling as it does looking for bargains in crowds unequalled since the days of the Black Hole of Calcutta, without the Muzak accompaniment of BandAid's dreadful "Do They Know It's Christmas?" or "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth."

(Younger readers may need guidance from their elders on some of this. So go forth, ask, and be prepared to duck.)

The Teletubbies this year have been replaced in Britain by a ditty rendered by a children's TV character called Bob the Builder, who should be to the building trade what Typhoid Mary was to medical insurance. But Bob is marginally an improvement over the Yuletide song from a seven-foot blob of plastic called, appropriately, Mr. Blobby.

The likes of the Teletubbies, Bob the Builder and Mr. Blobby (and, for my money, Phil Specter) are why the Webb TVs, stereos and radios are all suitably equipped with remote controls. And when we clean the reindeer poop off the roof, we deal with only eight piles, not nine.

If the Christmas melodies and lyrics of recent decades provide a whole new dimension to the words "awful" and "racket," there at least is the excuse that it is a breath of fresh air from most other pop music these days, much of which is reminiscent of a windchime factory at the epicenter of an earthquake.

But for sheer breathtaking Yuletide banality at a price, it would be hard to beat the list that I've come across, billed as "what the rich will be buying each other this Christmas."

There is the aforementioned champagne bucket - described more flowingly as a "Millennium champagne bowl" - for the better part of a quarter of a million bucks. For what it's worth, it holds 12 magnums of champagne.

I would go for the McLaren F1, price $919,000, except that there's a one-year waiting list for this made-to-order set of wheels, and I'm an impatient customer-to-be. It can go from zero to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds and hit a top speed of 237 mph. Which means you could get across London in about four minutes.

Except that traffic in London today moves at a rate of 9 miles an hour, about 2 mph worse than in 1899. Still, you can sit in your McLaren F1 looking cute for hours at a time.

Someone has produced six crystal and gold chess sets for London's chi-chi Harrod's department store for $160,000 per set. I'd be interested in the one remaining, except that the last time I played the game I lost in a three-move Fool's Mate. Besides which, I still haven't paid last month's water bill.

For the distaff side, there's a ruby-encrusted bra, only a shade over $15 million, Mercurochrome and bandages extra. Also there's a Versace fox-fur bomber jacket, at a knock-down $7,350. If I gave my wife Elizabeth that for Christmas, I'd need daily doses of Ex-Lax for the next six weeks to get rid of it.

How about a 530mph executive jet? Just send along $48 million to the Boeing folks (e-mail: www.boeing.com). Or perhaps a Sunseeking 80 yacht (about $6 million, less what you get for your kayak in a trade-in).

Mind you, there's little relationship between price and attractiveness. On sale is a set of TAG McLaren F1 AvantGarde stereo speakers, only $20,000 or so - "guaranteed to rock even the largest space," says London's Daily Mail newspaper.

What the AvantGarde speakers look like are the suckers on the tentacles of an octopus that has been in the Arctic Ocean too long. For $20,000, I'd think you could buy stereo equipment that didn't look like you needed a harpoon to keep at bay.

All of this is a long way from the days of finding socks under the Christmas tree, or discovering the chemistry set hidden in the attic (and hating yourself because you did find it four weeks before the Day), or watching your dad's face when he opened one present to find the world's most revolting tie.

I remain convinced that those were happier days of glad tidings.

I also suspect the lad at that first Christmas 2,000 years ago wouldn't have traded his gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense for all the McLaren F1s and octopus speakers on the planet. Then again, he might have thought for an instant of asking for a recount.

Thought for the Week: Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

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