Portobello Road market on a slow, sloppy Sunday afternoon. I thought I’d take the time out to see if I could find any nice Christmas trinkets before I suffocate under the masses of people frantically searching for quick gifts.

As I pondered and wandered between stalls I noticed that although there were plenty of Christmas gifts to choose from, surprisingly this included very few traditional Christmas albums. I flashed back to primary school when we sang Christmas carols to the locals. Then to when I had a Saturday job as a young teenager in a supermarket, where at Christmas we had classic Christmas songs playing in the shop, as opposed to nothing in the preceding 11 months. It dawned on me that there might be a time when I stroll through the market and no longer find compilations of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby’s Christmas classics. Especially as in recent years we’ve had Christmas number ones from artists- and I use the term loosely- like Bob the Builder.

“I’ve got so many of these you know,’ a passer-by says to me, as he toys with one of the vinyl records on display. “When I was a kid my mum used to play ‘em from the beginning of December, all the way through to the end of January,” he chuckles.

In that sentiment it seemed as though Christmas songs are a dying breed. I decided to dig deep into the memories of Christmas past, to discover when Christmas songs stopped being as such and just became songs at Christmas.

My grandparents came to England at a time when Elvis Presley and The Beatles were topping the Christmas charts for weeks at a time and my mum grew up when Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” first burst onto the Christmas scene and was at number one for five weeks. I was born in the year of Cliff Richard’s “Mistletoe and Wine”, so in the best part of twenty to thirty years or so, things were still fairly Christmassy.

Then in the early nineties something went horribly wrong. Mr Blobby and Spice Girl domination. I won’t be hard on the Spice Girls because as a child I adored them, but Mr Blobby was never a character I understood.

For those of you that were not in the country or surrounding areas during the Blobby period you should count yourselves lucky. The rest of us were subjected to a ridiculous “Blobby Song” for not only Christmas but also for the best part of the decade!

This, I’m sure, not only dampened the average consumer’s Christmas spirits, but seemingly had the same effect on recording artists. We had only one Christmas themed Number One in Bob Geldof’s Band Aid with a re-release of “Do they know it’s Christmas” and that first came out 15 years before.

It may be fair to say that Mr Blobby marked the end of proper Christmas songs. Gone were the days of “Lonely this Christmas” and in came the days of “Somethin’ Stupid” by Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman- their chosen words not mine and something about underground sounds by Girls Aloud.

As I leave the vinyl collector to haggle over the price of Harry Belafonte’s “Mary’s Boy Child” with the stall owner, I think of the large part music plays in our Christmas spirit. As much as we all complain about overpriced gifts and long queues when the season to be jolly comes around, Wham’s “Last Christmas” is bound to put a slight smile on our faces, at least for the first time we hear it. I’m not so sure I’d have the same reaction to Bob the Builder’s song , after it reached number one in 2000 and remained there for three long weeks.

Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll walk into my local supermarket in that twelfth month and hear Mr Blobby babbling through the speakers.

If so, at least I can always retreat to my beloved Portobello Road to get that Christmas spirit. It’s that or re-runs of Top of the Pops 2.

By Billie McTernan