Have you noticed that it’s beginning to look

a lot like Christmas? No? Well it is, and there’s nothing we can do to repel this tinsel-tinged tsunami. Decorations going up here, carols being piped into shops there, supermarket chains flogging an inedible range of oven-ready seasonal swill everywhere?

According to jaunty auld songs of yore, Christmas used to last 12 days while you’d only start to get a fluttering of yuletide glee around about the 21st of December when you bought the festive edition of the Radio Times. Nowadays, Christmas is so grotesquely bloated it resembles a mildly inebriated uncle in a wonky, crumpled paper hat wearily pawing and belching at the ravaged remnants of the Quality Street jar.

Amid all this jingle, jangle fankle, it’s European Tour cards, not packs of three-for the-price-of-two Christmas cards, that the golfers at the qualifying school final are focused on this week.

Given that it’s a prolonged, six-round marathon, the q-school seems to go on longer than the ruddy panto season. And let’s face it, there will be plenty of players shrieking like Widow Twankey getting goosed by a mischievous Aladdin if they fail to become

one of the 25 and ties who make it on to the 2019 Race to Dubai.

Of course, getting a tour card is one thing. Actually getting to use that card is another. There are many robust detractors of the q-school process who will roar that those players who earn a spot on the main circuit get little chance to gain a sturdy foothold due to limited outings.

Many critics will have you believe that when a player taps in on the closing hole of the final to seal their spot at the top table, they may as well bypass the locker room and head straight to Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard because there will be more chance of finding a European Tour start there.

In this tough, unforgiving, cut-throat game of golden opportunities and ones that got away, however, you have to make the most of every chance that presents itself. If you don’t then, someone else will. That is the challenge of professional sport in its upper echelons. There is no right to success and there can be no room for a sense of entitlement.

Sam Horsfield, for instance, won the qualifying school final last year and went on to enjoy 26 starts on the European Tour which included two Rolex Series events worth a combined $14m.

In the crucial early tournaments of the season for a new recruit, which may not offer the biggest prize funds and don’t necessarily feature the strongest players, Horsfield managed a fourth and a second and hammered down solid foundations while others were struggling to find their feet.

He is currently 51st on the rankings and preparing for the money-soaked DP World Tour Championship this week.

In comparison, Scotland’s Connor Syme shared 11th in the q-school last November and eased on to the main circuit. The Fifer also had a programme of 26 starts and, despite a runners-up placing in the Shot Clock Masters, he failed to safeguard his full tour category after finishing 126th on the money list.

There was no woe-is-me, hard luck talk from Syme, though, and in an interview with this scribe at the end of a topsy turvy campaign he readily admitted that he had more than enough opportunities to establish himself.

He didn’t have many complaints.

While the q-school clatters on this week, and folk discuss the pros and cons of the long-standing process, perhaps we should spare a thought for the women competing in the Ladies European Tour (LET) qualifying school, which starts at the weekend.

Take out the female majors, the Ladies Scottish Open, which is co-sanctioned with the LPGA Tour, and a couple of other special, limited-access gatherings and there were barely 12 events for members to play in throughout a stop-start year.

There was just one event staged in April,

one beginning on the final day of May, one in June and, Scottish Open aside, nothing in July. There is talk of things improving in 2019 but for the 25 card winners at the q-school, it’s still a future shrouded in uncertainty.

And here’s folk in the men’s game thinking there are haves and have-nots?