Christmas presents come in three distinct phases. The first is infancy, in which life itself is the gift and it's impossible to distinguish between the box, the wrapping paper, and the present itself. The second is childhood, when you know what you want and an indulgent parent can afford to buy it for you: that plastic sword, that Spider-man action figure. The third is adulthood, when you know what you want, but you also know Santa is unlikely to provide an Aston Martin driven by Cate Blanchett, along with the comforting sound of a bound and gagged Jeremy Clarkson kicking impotently in the boot. But for now forget socks, ties, and the bitter disappointments of reality: let's get Santa to give us a real digital Christmas.

We'll start in your living room, and that means TVs. I've always been more of a fan of LCD TVs than plasmas, but having had the chance to play around with one of the new Panasonic Vieras I confess I'm smitten. Deep rich blacks, warm, vibrant colour, and an elegant silver and black design make a TVs like the 42" TH42PX600 at around £1,500 a real object of desire, or for the full 1080p experience, a Sony Bravia LCD like the 46" KDL-46 W2000 (£2500). We'll be investing in Sky HD to get your hard-drive TV recording action sorted (that's £299 along with an extra £10 on top of your TV package and £60 installation fee.) You're enough of a geek that you'll also be wanting to put your High Definition movie trailers and BitTorrented TV from the net through this screen, so we'll get you one of the more elegant Media Centre PCs to play with, perhaps the Acer Aspire iDea 500, for around £850.

You should have been enjoying Sony's newest, gorgeous-looking games console, the PlayStation 3, but sadly it won't be generally available in the UK until next March, so instead you'll be having a laugh boxing with your Nintendo Wii (£180), and then playing Gears of War (£40) on your Microsoft Xbox 360 (£280), once the kids have gone to bed. This game has to be seen to be believed for simply gorgeous (if gory) next-generation console fun. And as we know people in the States we'll score you one of the new HD DVD (£130) drives for your Xbox. And hell, why we're at it, we'll pick up the new Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc player as well for a cool thousand pounds, just to be on the safe side: format wars are not a problem if money is no object.

With a great big screen you'll be wanting to show off your own pictures and movies in glorious high definition, so to get HD home movies going on you'll need to invest in one of Sony's HD camcorders, such as the Sony Handycam HDR-HC3 (£750). And to take a step up from that compact camera you've been using for far too long, let's go for the lovely Canon EOS 400D, a relatively small, easy to use digital SLR which should set us back around £500.

We don't want to mess around with the Media Center PC when we're editing images, so let's go for a really decent high-specification Apple iMac machine (£1100) along with a copy of iLife (£55), which means we can use iTunes for our music, iPhoto for managing our pictures, and iMovie HD to work on that holiday home movie. Of course you don't need me to tell you again that your music will be piped around every room of your pad with a sweet Sonos music system for around £1,200.

So now we can watch state-of-the-art HD TV in the living room, and listen to beautiful music in every part of the house, but what about when we want to watch films?

For that we’ll need a cutting-edge projector, such as the InFocus IN76 DLP Projector (£1,200) set up in the lounge, along with a really nice 5.1 surround sound system such as the Sony DAV-LF 1H (£500).

So now we can watch DVDs and I suppose I'll buy two Blu-ray players so we can watch them on the Panasonic Plasma or the JVC projector (well, it is Christmas). What else can we do to get in the gadget mood? I'm quite taken with the way Philips is providing elegant, rather daft gadgets to sprinkle around the digipad, so let's make sure there are a couple of classy looking 7" Digital Photo Displays (£160 each) in the bookcase, and maybe even some nice Imageo electronic candles (£20) to give that knowing, post-modern, techno, cold-as-ice look to the place.

We’ll want to take some of this gadget glamour with us when we leave, so we better have a nice rucksack with the new James Bond phone, the Sony Ericsson K800i (with contract), along with the latest iPod Video 80GB (£260), the latest Archos 604 portable video player stuffed full of broadcast video from the Media Center (£270) along with its docking station for recording TV to go (£70). And we'll take a Sony PSP (£150) and a Nintendo DS Lite (£100) just in case we get bored…

Surely around £15,000 is a small price to pay to rekindle the wondrous stuff of childhood? Of course your mileage may very depending on the configurations of the models you buy and whatever deals you can get online. Back in the real world, look on the bright side: you might get those digital candles from Philips. Remember to smile in surprise when you open the box. Merry Christmas!

Michael Parsons is Editor of CNET.co.uk, the personal technology and consumer electronics website. He was Editorial Director of the Industry Standard Europe and European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at Michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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