If I’m honest I haven’t been feeling very Christmassy up to now, even though all the deccies are up, the TV schedules are looking fabulous and we’ve started on the mince pies. That was until last night, when I spent 75 minutes in the company of the people of Lark Rise and Candleford. By the time they were all gathered in front of the Post Office for their carol singing I was not only Christmassy I was positively Dickensian. And they threw in a bit of a ghost story too!

Writer Bill Gallagher did a cracking job of stuffing this episode with as many Christmas goodies as possible, the main message being the seasonal stress everyone endures when trying to decide what to do for the best. Do you go to the mother-in-law’s? Do you invite her back to yours? Do you spend the entire holiday traipsing up and down the country trying to satisfy everyone, or do you just hunker down behind a wall of Christmas cake and do your own thing?

In the Lark Rise/Candleford microcosm the issue is still a serious one even though the two locations you have to choose from are only a short walk apart. A small distance geographically, but sometimes that can be a million miles emotionally. So while Laura is initially delighted to be given leave to spend Christmas at the Post Office with Dorcas, the strain this puts on her relationship with her mother, and eventually her father and their relationship with Dorcas swells like a festering boil, requiring some plain speaking, compassion and love to lance it.

Talking of festering boils, this is exactly how timid Ruby Pratt refers to her controlling sister Pearl, having finally found the courage to speak out and do what she wants for once.

All this plain speaking can be traced back to the spectral appearance of a young woman walking in the woods, and wandering around village and town looking for something. Or someone. The ghostly figure strikes fear into the hearts of some, but more often elicits pity and compassion from the good folk of the area, until they discover the unquiet spirit to be that of young Molly Mears, who drowned in the pond 80 years earlier while searching for her pa.

Light relief came from Twister and Alf, and their wassailing activities, from the exquisitely played tentative romantic dance between postie Thomas Brown and Miss Ellison and as always from the Arless family, although they too had their share of the Christmas spirit as father Walter came to realise what he had in his family was too good to run away from again, and decided to settle on dry land.

Lark Rise provided a 75 minute visual feast of Christmas imagery – all crisp sparkling snow, warm glowing fires, light spilling out into frost-rimed streets and yuletide food. The costumes seemed richer, the emotions closer to the surface, the eyes moister, the smiles more genuine. It would be unfair to pick out any single actor for praise from this uniformly excellent cast, all of whom put in solid performances. Even Dawn French’s character began to look less like a refugee from a French & Saunders sketch. Loved the whole thing from beginning to end.

Lark Rise to Candleford returns to BBC One on Sunday nights from January 4th.