AM I downhearted? Well, a pipe burst under the house over the weekend giving me an indoor, unheated, basement swimming pool; the kitchen tap spurted its last, which took the best part of the day to change, and the guttering has developed a leak.

Did I mention the 40ft shadow looming over the house? The tree-surgeon has quoted such an astronomical price for removal I'm thinking on lighting it up for Christmas with petrol.

Yet I have good cause to smile and wish 90% of Scots festive cheer. I'm not on anti-depressants.

The remaining 10%, doped to the eyeballs on uppers, don't need any good wishes from me or anyone else since they are enjoying the benefit of a drug induced happy-haze.

Scotland, it's claimed, has become a Prozac nation' with around one-in-10 people over the age of 15 on anti-depressants at a cost of more than £40million a year to the NHS. A fact so depressing, well, you can only laugh.

Not that I'm making light of a very real mental illness triggered, so I'm led to believe, by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

I have friends who suffered depression and most have recovered, pretty much. A few tried suicide and a couple succeeded.

No, the pill-poppers who upset me are those who feel a bit down and head for the amiable GP who hands over chemical cheer because it's quick, easy and keeps the queue in the surgery under control.

Except, like so many miracle cures, anti-depressants can be as bad as the illness. Each carries a health warning worth a medical encyclopaedia.

The risks include suicide, violent behaviour, loss of libido, nausea, anxiety and, irony of ironies, depression.

And, as if that lot wasn't warning enough, even the pharmaceutical companies admit they don't quite understand how the drugs work - on anything other than their balance sheets.

But it's so much easier to swallow a lie than face the truth: happiness is not a right but a state of mind.

And, like so many other treatments, the symptoms are tackled instead of the cause; false expectation based on material wealth.

Which brings me to the real reason I'll be smiling through Christmas.

It will be simpler and a little more austere because, like tens of thousands of others, I've been credit crunched and will be watching the pennies.

No dashing round shops over-spending and trying to match value with worth.

This year the watchwords are "practical presents".

But on the day itself I'll take the dog to the park as usual and have around me what matters most; my wife, children and their partners.

Whatever pleasure there is won't come neatly tied in a blister pack or a bottle filled with instant sunshine.

Christmas Day will be a noisy, rumbustious, occasionally argumentative family affair. And a better prescription than Prozac.