I'm a humanist. I'm good with Christmas.

But Emma's points are spot on. Giok asks why we give gifts and have a knees-up in the winter if it's no longer anything to do with Christ.

Well, as most folkies know, Christmas was grafted onto much older, midwinter celebrations. Lots of religions have them. I'm not a Christian, but neither am I a pagan - I still like to have a bit of a knees-up at the darkest time of the year, which is really what it was all about in the first place, right? Banishing the cold and the darkness with a bit of festivity? I mean, everyone knows Jesus wasn't actually born on the 25th of December, and it was in the desert and everything. Not a lot to really make it bear any resemblance to the midwinter revelry we know today - but then again, the midwinter revelry came first anyway. I genuinely love carols like "In the Bleak Midwinter" precisely because they graft a particular kind of Englishness onto this utterly foreign experience. Kinda like Holman Hunt's very English-looking Jesus in The Light of the World.

I remember at my Convent school one of the priests once told us that Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, not Christmas, and if we revered Christmas over Easter we were all heathen blasphemers who were going to hell in a handcart. Did that make us love Easter any more? Nope. But, you know, there wasn't midnight mass at Easter. Or carolling, or any of the other good stuff, except swanning around on the boardwalk in a big hat. It was a bit rubbish in comparison, really. Maybe there's simply something a bit deeper in us that longs to celebrate at this time of year.

I'm happy to call it Christmas, because it's traditional ;). I'm not that bothered about contemplating Christ's birth, but I love each and every other tradition that goes along with it. So yes, I'll be hauling my agnostic arse down to our 1000 year old village church on Christmas eve. The church will be lit with candles, and the children in the village will sing, and I'll probably get roped into serving mulled wine and mince pies like last year. And then we'll go to the pub on the village green, and I will share a drink and a laugh with my neighbours around the fire.

That's my Christmas - totally traditional, and totally godless. And anyone who doesn't like it is equally welcome to cool their bums in a snowdrift. :)