I love the sound, the smell, the gluttony and kitsch of Xmas

Again, apologies, but I love Christmas. I love the sound and smell of it, the tinsel and the twinkle, the downing tools, nothing-can-be-done-until-after-it’s-over-ness, the eating-until-you-look-like-Bernard-Manning gluttony, and the pathos with which this country clings to a lost-in-climate-change hope that it might still snow.

I love it more because I’m Jewish, as when I was a kid, although we did go to my parents friends Tony and Naomi Inwald’s house on Boxing Day, Christmas Day itself was a big nothing, no presents, no grand meal, just sitting around with a sense of an enormous party happening somewhere else. Every year, I plunge into the festive season headfirst, hoping to recover a bit more of that missed-out-on Yuletide joy.

This is I must stress, nothing to do with Jesus. Obviously. I haven’t received the Nazarene into my heart, nor have I become a Jew for Him, which as we all know is the barmiest thing even in the crazy barmy world of faith. What it’s to do with is Morecambe And Wise, and Xmas Top of the Pops, and adverts with jingle bells starting in November, and mince pies which are kind of disgusting but in a good way, and the fabulous nothingness of the Queen’s Speech, and terrible cracker jokes. It’s not a Jesus thing, it’s a British thing.

My favourite Christmas songs are, obviously, not the ones about the Three Wise Men and/or Mangers, but songs like Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody, with its invocation not of spirituality or prayer, but of the reality, the practicality, the mucking-in of Christmas: Are you waiting for your family to arrive / Are you sure you’ve got the room to spare inside?

My favourite Christmas song, in fact, is I Believe In Father Christmas by Greg Lake, which, lyrically, is an attack on Xmas commercialisation (something which generally doesn’t bother me, with the exception the one time me and my family were dragged out of Dickens World in Chatham in order to watch an extremely young Santa Claus abseil down Nandos).

It doesn’t matter: the song still yearns, like all the best ones do, for an ideal of pastoral, village Christmas, a wintry, misty vision — the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell — which lies inside this country’s collective heart like a promise of peace.

The amateur psychologists amongst you may say that such a craving for Christmas, particularly that particular Darling Buds of December version of Christmas, is subconsciously about assimilation. That may be so.

It may be that coming as I do from refugee stock — on my mum’s side they were fleeing the Nazis, and on my dad’s, a few generations further back, Russian pogroms — that the idyllic Britishness I’m fetishising here represents, basically, sanctuary.

But I would say that if it does, that such sanctuary is all mixed up with nostalgia for my childhood, and also with a wish for a different kind of sanctuary in the present. We are all too connected now, too reactive. Technology has made our lives full of noise, and rage, and anxiety.

I think Christmas, for all the fact that it often ends up with family arguments and tough turkey and disappointing presents, is a time when you can put the phone down and cut yourself off and, for a few days, disengage. That really is why I find myself deeply looking forward to it.

Obviously, having written all this, I feel some of you might be thinking, if it’s cutting-off-from-the-everyday-world you want, just stop being so yokishe, and look forward to next Yom Kippur. Chag Sameach.