It's that time of year when your doorbell seems to ring non-stop by strangers wanting something from you.

And it's usually at that point in the evening when I feel the least charitable.

I'm a strictly "by appointment only" sort of person, as all my friend's know. So if our buzzer does sound around dinnertime, just as I'm scraping baked beans off the inside of the microwave oven again and shouting at our toddler for pouring her juice into her potty, I'm likely to ignore it. If the caller persists, I get very cross.

In the run-up to Halloween we had several unexpected rings on the doorbell, most of which went uninvestigated.

"That'll be trick or treaters again," I said to my husband when we both heard giggling and shuffling on our doorstep two nights before the dead were due to walk the earth.

When the bell finally rang, neither of us made a move.

"You go," said my husband, not looking up from his newspaper.

"No, you go," I said, tearfully. "I'm busy chopping onions."

"You go, you go," he said, leaping to his feet suddenly and charging up the stairs, (such is his terror of the unknown).

"Coward," I cried. But I still didn't open the door. I was too busy making soup to worry about telling off children (and probably for parents, too) for disturbing my evening, frightening my husband and wanting to wipe me out of chocolate bars.

On Halloween itself I did open the door, but only because whoever rang kept their finger on the button for such a long time that I thought it was a real emergency. I left our toddler unattended in the bath for two minutes while I ran downstairs and was furious when I opened the door and saw three witches.

"I've no time for your nonsense. I've left a baby in the bath," I said, before slamming the door. Then, of course, for the next two hours I was too frightened to go into the hallway in case they'd posted a headless toad through our letterbox.

We'll shortly be entering the carol singing season and I'm afraid my response to any tuneless warbling on our doorstep will be similar. I'll either start doing the vacuuming and make out I didn't hear anything or I'll open the door, with a face like Christmas Past, and tell them to go home and inflict this misery on their parents.

What annoys me most is that carol singers work even less for their reward than the trick or treaters. At least most of the latter attempt to look scary in their bin liners and luminous face paint. The only seaosnal offering I've ever heard our wandering minstrels perform in recent years is a quick chorus of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and that only comes after you've opened the door to them. If they made a little more effort, perhaps a verse or two of Hark, the Herald, or my favourite, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, I might not be so Scrooge-like.

I doubt this will happen, so I've decided not to open the door to any unexpected callers in the run-up to Christmas unles they insist they need to read our metres.