I'm all for the commercialisation of Christmas. It endorses the tradition that Christmas is a festival of giving, of generosity, of thinking of other people.Those elements seem to be the crystallisation of the feast in popular terms even if they are not its deepest spiritual meaning.
Such common aspects are important because they draw believer and non-believer together in a shared custom, whatever its origin might have been. They offer us a chance to show the best of ourselves, to be thoughtful, to be affectionate and in one way or another to be joyful. Sermons are not preached on this unifying creativity.
Instead, perhaps justifiably, the defenders of the spiritual context of Christmas try to repel commercialisation as if it had nothing to do with the celebration.
They can point to the gross ironies by which people who will never voluntarily enter a church do their seasonal shopping to the tones of hymns and carols they have long abandoned, if they ever knew them.
People who will keep Christmas as a holiday time, when logically they could go to work as usual, the festivity having no meaning for them beyond the turkey and, if they're lucky, the mistletoe.
Living like this, without reflection or question, is current and comfortable and the way we do things now. Even if it's empty, it is at least harmless. It may not enrich us, but it does not damage any ideals we hold dear, even though we hold so very few things dear at all.
Where real confusion starts is where people who do not have Christmas in their own culture see its two-month long anticipation and its week-long duration as an attack on their sensitivities. Or rather, where others dealing with such people, while themselves of the majority tradition, willingly forsake its significance as well as its emblems rather than risk "offence".
It's understandable that a loud and possibly drunken celebration of Christmas cheer in, say, Sudan, might cause offence -- even to Christians.
The Sudanese, as has been so obvious in the last couple of weeks, have too much respect for their own religion to let anything, even a teddy-bear, sully it.
And although both the complaints and protests about the Teddy Bear called Muhammed were obviously contrived, the affronted Sudanese at least were not prepared to let a perceived insult go unchallenged.
Here, in contrast, the majority approach is apologetic, lazy and just plain stupid, almost as much an insult in itself to the intelligence of those it pretends to acknowledge as it is to the traditions about to be discarded.
Some Christians, especially in schools and even, it seems, in creches, have so exaggerated a fear of offending people of other races or cultures that they will yield rather than defend their own religious traditions.
So nativity plays, cribs, carols, Christmas candles and advent calendars are out, but Christmas lights, Bad Santas, "yule-tide" music and television toy- shows are in.
Still, on the evidence of our personal Irish moral judgments and our application of ethical principles to our behaviour, it would be hard to blame any non-Christian for thinking that Christmas and the Christ Child are just so much codswallop.
The recent RTE Prime Time programme on planning processes around the country revealed such astonishing -- even if not unsuspected -- levels of crude opportunism and greed as to defy any pretence that religious teaching means anything to the Irish.
It was not so much that individual councillors ignored regulations and promoted their own interests at the cost of the public good, it is that their many colleagues supported them in doing so.
The programme highlighted a kind of customary venality: in some cases public representatives acting as accessories by stealth, in others by blatant self-interest. And all convinced they wouldn't lose any votes.
Even Pat Kenny presenting Podge and Rodge puppets as prominent items in the Late Late Toy Show couldn't quite match the vulgarity of the local councils shown by Prime Time.
Traipsing through Cork city and county in search of a Christmas tree that does shed, ringing up garden centres to see if they might have just one little Norway Spruce rather than millions of Noble Firs or Nordmaniana, finally getting on the internet to buy an advent calendar without tinsel or chocolate, I wonder if any of this effort is worth while?
Christmas, after all, originated as a pagan festival and perhaps its critics are right: it makes no difference to the way we behave throughout the year, so why all this fuss now?
We can't pretend we're holy and increasingly we don't even pretend that Christmas itself is a holy time, a gentler, kinder time, worth honouring.
Better perhaps to go with John Betjeman's description of a time when " . . . girls in slacks remember Dad/ And oafish louts remember Mum", a time of "loving fingers tying strings/ Around those tissued fripperies/ The sweet and silly Christmas things,/ Bath salts and inexpensive scent/ And hideous tie so kindly meant".
Better to place our faith in the commerci- alisation that ignores "the steeple-shaking bells".
Commerce in fact, may be all we have left to remind us of Christmas's single truth.
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Sotto Voce