So it’s Christmas again, with the ruthless predictability for which the calendar is notorious.

I got down the decorations from the attic this afternoon, in the usual shower of dust, lagging and swearing. Well, most of the decorations, anyway. We got lazy with the nativity crib and it’s been left out in the living room for two years. We tell surprised visitors that it’s a ‘pan-seasonal Bethlehem diorama’.

The usual parade of shameless cash-ins are all reporting for duty. A James Bond 007 cologne is advertised in this week’s Guardian, described by GQ as “the most dangerously sophisticated fragrance in the world.” This seems a bit of a stretch for a product based on what is, effectively, a  comic-book superhero. And in any event, I’ve seen the movies. I imagine that James Bond smells of sweat and cordite most of the time. And I never see him brush his teeth.

If you fancy giving a loved one a religiously-themed present, a number of companies have been excelling themselves in the ill-conceived ideas department. Products designed by people born tragically without taste this year include a ‘Let My People Go’ Moses toilet seat cover, a dog nativity set and a  ‘Jesus Is My Gymnastics Coach‘ plastic figurine. All of which are almost as inappropriate as alleviating your boredom in church by pretending that they’re singing about you.

Now that booting up my Toshiba laptop requires three weeks’ notice and a jump-start from the car, I’m hoping for a Macbook for Christmas. I intend to arrange this by asking Wifey for something unimaginably expensive like a Patek Philippe watch, a yacht or a new spleen ‘for cosmetic reasons’. Then I can negotiate her down to a Macbook and she’ll think she’s winning. Macbook owners, I am told, generally do not need to rely on the power of prayer if they wish to access the internet.

This sounds luxurious.

“I wish it could be Christmas, every daaaaay…”

For Christians, it’s a tempting time to complain about how the ‘reason for the season’ has submerged beneath a rising tide of boiling, frothing commercialism. However, this is something we usually do while simultaneously buying shed-loads of presents to indulge the kids we love (thus inadvertently imbuing them with the same consumerism of which we have grown tired – and the circle of life goes on).

There’s truth in the increased secularisation and over-consumerism of Christmas. Of course there is. We all recognise that. Some people were trying to spread the cost of Christmas this year by starting their shopping four months early, in September. But what might be more interesting than mourning the evolution of the modern Christmas into a festival of present-buying and “er, well it’s about family, yeah, and being nice to people for a bit, right?” is to ask whether it really is as ‘unchristian’ as many of us often think it is.

If we truly believe that the God we worship exists, then we don’t need to feel marginalised by people participating in our celebration without believing in the reason for it. Instead, we could have the confidence to look for the opportunities this social oddity represents. You see, if we complain too much about Christmas becoming a popular festival rather than a Christian celebration we take ourselves down a wintery mental cul-de-sac.

The startling thing is that not only does God like Christmas, but He wants to see more of it. All the positive things about it – the focus on giving to each other, spending time with each other, the sense of hope, the random goodwill to strangers (charity donations rise at Christmas) – are what God wants to see all year round. Christmas – even in its current Western format –  is a fleeting glimpse of what Jesus was talking about when he described the Kingdom of Heaven.

Christmas is an opportunity to describe the Kingdom of Heaven to people who don’t know what Jesus was on about, more vividly than any ivory tower-dwelling theologian could.

Jesus described a way to live and see the world where people give freely to each other, forgive each other, think more inclusively and commit random acts of goodness against people they don’t know. It is a way to live that is underpinned by the electricity of hope. It is way to live where the same indefatigable spirit that drives a person through the misery of the High Street on Christmas Eve to buy gifts is deployed every day to fight suffering in the world.

From God’s perspective, Christmas may have lost less Christianity than many of us think it has. Instead, maybe it gives us a brief and partial insight into the world that we, as Christians, are supposed to be trying to cultivate for the other 11 months of the year.