SO are you ready for Christmas then? Karen Carr is - Christmas 2007... Just when the rest of us are staggering towards this year's festive finale, Karen is a whole year and two Christmases ahead of us and is heading purposefully towards Easter 2008.

Karen is marketing manager for the MetroCentre, the biggest shopping centre in Europe and just voted the best in Britain. More than half a million of us shop there every week. And yes, we know that in the last few weeks it has seemed as though every one of those half a million is in front of you in the car park, but at least that shows that Karen and the team are doing something right.

Karen, 46, is frighteningly energetic - just as well when her job has included chasing cows, and sheep through the malls, organising fashions shows, food fairs, checking on Father Christmas in his grotto, learning emergency first aid and being filmed for weeks for a TV fly-on-the-wall documentary.

"I'm very driven," she says. "I don't need much coffee to get me going in the morning, I love juggling with a whole load of different things at once." Which is just as well really.

She has been at the MetroCentre for 18 years, back in the days when it was still fairly new and out of town shopping was a revolutionary idea. Since then shopping, once a boring chore, has become one of our major leisure interests and the idea of "retail therapy", so bizarre when it was first named, has become totally commonplace.

"And people's expectations have changed. They travel abroad so often now," says Karen, herself a queen of the cheap flight, "that they expect more. What they've seen in other countries, they expect to see here, so it's up to us to try to provide that."

But it's not just shopping.

"We try and give people much more than that."

So in recent weeks there has been all sorts of activity in the malls - Santa's Grotto, a Christmas carol service, concerts, choirs and nativity plays by local schools, a food and craft fair, a Christmas book drive, a charity appeal on behalf of the Salvation Army and the Metrognome Christmas panto.

"The centre is part of the community," says Karen. "We try to make it the best and the most appealing - and we're lucky to have had so much investment - but it's the whole experience that makes people want to come back. They've got to enjoy it."

A Cramlington lass, Karen left school with few qualifications and started in the information department at Newcastle City Council.

"It was brilliant," she says. "They encouraged me to study, gave me day release and I acquired all sorts of qualifications, including A-levels, while working for them, so much so that all I did in my teens and early twenties was work and study. Then I realised that at that age I was meant to be partying too, so pretty quickly made up for lost time."

But Newcastle gave her great experiences including helping organise the first Tall Ships visit to the city. And a trip to America.

"That was one of my first jobs and I was still quite young," she says. "As part of the Friendship Force I had to take a group of Geordies to Las Vegas. It was very entertaining and we had a great time. I even managed to bring them all back safely."

She joined the MetroCentre in promotions - in the days when health and safety laws were a bit more relaxed.

"Oh, we did all sorts of things in the early days. We had a food and farming fair with cows in the malls. Sheep shearing, too. All sorts of animals. We had lots of fashions shows too, of course but the idea was that there was always something going on."

As other shopping malls sprang up all over the country, the MetroCentre had to fight hard to keep ahead. Karen moved up the ladder. The MetroCentre has grown much bigger, shopping hours have been extended. And Karen's role has changed - less direct involvement with the activities on the malls, which she misses. "There's a great team to do that now, though I still try and get out there when I can.

"The tricky thing was changing people's ideas of when to shop," says Karen. "In the early days everyone arrived and left at the same time, which didn't help the traffic, but now it's much more spread out over the day, people will shop in the evenings now, so there is less hassle."

Apart, perhaps, from Christmas shopping and the January sales, where everyone seems to want to park right outside Marks & Spencer.

"But I just love it here, because there's always something new going on, more ideas to try," she says.

And that included Trouble in Store, the television documentary about life in the MetroCentre in which Karen was a star player - and which has just been repeated on UK TV.

"It was an ordeal," says Karen. "It went on for months and the staff here said it was great because when the cameras were on me I just smiled a lot and was so calm and composed. Most unlike my usual self. But believe me, that was only because every now and then I would run and hide in a cupboard and scream. Then come out again, all calm.

"Actually, I didn't mind the filming. You soon got used to the cameras and they were a good team. The real ordeal was watching the end product. We had no influence at all over the editing and you know how easy it is to edit things that can make them seem out of all proportion to what really happened. So when I had to watch it I was so nervous that I felt really physically sick. That was the worst part.

"But it seemed to turn out all right. Every morning on the malls people would call out to me, saying they'd been watching so I think it went well."

Even after all these years, Karen's enthusiasm for the MetroCentre hasn't waned. "Though I think perhaps my favourite time of year is January when the Christmas decorations are down, the sales are over, it's a fresh start and I can start planning ahead," she says.

Next year is the MetroCentre's 21st birthday, with months of special events planned between Easter and October.

There is, of course, a huge downside to spending all your working days in Europe's biggest shopping centre.

"I just love shopping," says Karen. "I haven't got tired of it. And here you are constantly tempted. But then the thing is I can easily spend a fortune just on my way to a meeting. The friends and family ring up and ask 'could you just get me...', so I have to go to the shops again."

But there are limits. "Weekends and holidays I like to get out walking, up on the hills or down on the beach with the dogs. After working here all week, it's wonderful to get out and feel some fresh air."