But, knowing what I know of myself today, all I will have on Christmas Day is the list.

Having money to call my own only from the age of 18, I came late to the joys of shopping and when I did, was the worst kind of impulse buyer for a good decade.

There was, for instance, the Cucumber Soap Incident of 1988 when, upon arrival in Singapore to begin life anew, I splashed out on said bar of cool at a toiletries cubbyhole in Parkway Parade.

Sure, it was a waste of my modest scholarship allowance, but it was also my own little slice of sophistication, a reminder of how lucky I was to be now living out my loftiest dreams here.

Alas, my $11.40 slice of sophistication melted away to a stub within a week. Its lack of glycerine meant that it stood no chance against the oft-hot showers I took in the hostel.

Disappointed I was, yes, but then disappointment I have long known.

Growing up and getting by in small-town Malaysia, clothes were a perennial source of embarrassment, not esteem, for me.

My sister and I lived mostly in hand-me-downs from my rich cousins, who were well-mannered, took care of their togs and were kind enough to give us even their most finely embroidered made-in-Thailand dresses.

One of these was the colour of pink spun sugar and my mother insisted that I wear it to my rich friend's Sweet 16 birthday party.

My classmates ooh-ed and aah-ed even as I frowned and fumed inwardly at all the unwarranted attention, which made me itch and scratch even more from the frissons of humiliation I felt (which is also why you will never find me in a vintage clothes store).

I, for one, found this all-in-the-family recycling ritual especially grating. As the first-born in my family, I'd toddled about in fully lined frocks, Buster Browns and Mary-Janes, dragging my two teddy bears from Harrods everywhere to boot, thanks to my doting maternal grandparents and my big-hearted father, who was on a short study stint in Oxford. (All these were eventually handed down to my sister.)

So, as a teen, I would register my displeasure by either refusing to change out of my school uniform from dawn to midnight or schlepping about in my blindingly hued seascape print shorts or a Punky Garfield print tee. So what if they faded and frayed soon enough? At least, I could call them my own (and, indeed, Punky Garfield tee is still in my closet drawer).

When I finally began earning enough to begin asserting my sense of style, I was like a prisoner let loose at a designer sale in a Milan warehouse. Gimme!

But my sense of self-worth soon suffered from all this surfeit.

I had my Penguin phase, during which I went about in too-sleek black suits and slacks matched with whiter-than-white blouses adorned with all manners of buttons and bows.

This lasted a good five years before I plunged headlong into my Painted Turtle phase, when my craze for turtlenecks was matched only by my fondness for large and loud print skirts and dangling earrings. I snapped out of it only when a well-meaning acquaintance asked why I of the short-short neck went about in blouses with stranglehold collars.

That sent me into stylistic hibernation, my Polar Bear phase if you will, when there wasn't a cardigan I didn't like. But then I also didn't like the number of times I was mistaken for the office clerk either.

Thankfully, lifestyle journalists Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine of What Not To Wear fame finally set me straight with their take-no-prisoners dictates, chief among which was 'stop the impulse buys!'. Yes, Ma'am (salute).

Sure, I felt like Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains Of The Day, who learnt to laugh by listening to radio ha-ha shows, but there we are.

So, it was only very recently that people began coming up to me and asking about who had cut my hair, or from where I had got my tops, shoes or bags. A reader of my columns, whom I met at a soiree a few months back, remains unconvinced that the person whose prose he peruses was really me. Oh, well. Better now than never, eh?

This, then, is what I have learnt about the real joys of shopping - to whittle all your yearnings down to only those things that really resonate with who you are, what you believe in and what you want to do about this one life you have to live.

That sounds egotistical, but it isn't, really, because I have learnt that it is crucial to one's well-being to assert one's sense of self, rather than just one's sense of style.

Doing so also allows you a spectrum of tastes and experiences, be it cucumber soap or a $20,000 Hermes Birkin bag. If it is really you, then I say go for it.

Happy festive shopping - and may intuition, not instinct, be your guide.

suk@sph.com.sg