Without Jesus and with less Santa, what does Christmas mostly consist of?

More than ever this year I find friends planning to go abroad for Christmas, some to countries such as India where the sun shines and Christmas is barely celebrated at all. I can see why. The goodwill and good cheer that the festival is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress and anxiety it causes. This has been the case for years, but it gets worse with the passage of time. More couples divorce, more families break up, and Christmas tends not to heal such wounds but to aggravate them.

The preparations for Christmas are more than joyless; they are soul-destroying. Try visiting Oxford Street at this time of year; or rather, don’t. There is frenzy in the air, and it can’t be attributed to philanthropy. The people fighting in department stores on Black Friday were not, I think, looking for nice presents for their children, but were being driven by some kind of mindless greed. It was, as George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in the Mail on Sunday, without ‘context’, just an orgy of acquisition, gratuitously whipped up by the retail industry.

Black Friday, Dr Carey said, ‘is of a piece with the reverence we now collectively show for the seasonal advertising campaigns — the TV commercials by Marks & Spencer and John Lewis for example — whose arrival we seem to anticipate with bated breath’. With the original purpose of Christmas now widely forgotten, new festive symbols, such as TV commercials, have had to be invented. Christmas has become like Winston Churchill’s rejected pudding; it has no theme.

Jesus Christ is no longer what Christmas is mainly about. A poll has found that only 20 per cent of the British population will be attending church this Christmas, and many of these will be people who never normally go to church at all.