Peter Noone (far left), the one-time lead singer for Herman’s Hermits, opens the holiday shopping season at The Galleria on November 23.

Patience may be a Christmas lesson drilled into wide-eyed kids yearning daily for Santa, but for salivating holiday shoppers, it’s merely an old-fashioned term at which they scoff. Christmas bells officially begin ringing at the ungodly hour of 1 a.m. on Friday, November 23, at the Riverchase Galleria. So much for the long winter’s nap. Thanksgiving leftovers won’t even be cold by then.

The only thing remotely old-fashioned about this yuletide shopping spree is the presence of Peter Noone, more famously known as Herman, one-time lead singer for the 1960s hit-makers Herman’s Hermits. With 23 Top 10 hits and 52 million records sold, the band was among the monarchy of the British invasion that included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, and a host of other limeys.

Herman’s Hermits’ classics such as “I’m Into Something Good,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” and the frivolous “I’m Henry the VIII” glued a generation of teens to AM radio and television shows such as “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig.” Along with their repertoire of irresistibly catchy pop hits, Herman’s Hermits were renowned for being one of the few British acts that sang in a heavy British dialect. “You had to have your own sound back then. You couldn’t sound like The Beatles or The Dave Clark Five. That’s why we did the first English accents on rock ‘n’ roll records,” Noone explains on his website.

Noone was 15 years old when Herman’s Hermits began topping the record charts. The squeaky clean Hermits image that alienated more serious, worldly teenagers was apparently no put-on, according to Noone in a 1999 interview with the Globe Correspondent. An admitted innocent, Noone recalls, “I hung out with the guys that knew what was going on, like The Beatles and The Stones. They were much more fun than the guys in my band.”

Peter Noone’s last show in Birmingham was 10 years ago at the Alabama State Fair, with local players enlisted as Hermits for the evening. Noone was every bit as enthusiastic and endearing as his showbiz persona, though the choirboy image took a couple of blows. Local drummer Leif Bondarenko recalls that Noone personally delivered a case of beer to the band before the show. Don Tinsley played bass that night, and recalls Noone’s penchant for cursing. “A very good-natured cuss word every other word,” Tinsley laughs.