The Grinch who tried to give back Christmas

Tomorrow we open the first window in our advent calendars. (Not me, though. I decided some years ago that if I want chocolate before breakfast, I will sodding have chocolate before breakfast. I don't need any excuses.) If we're not already, we start panicking about how little time we have left to buy our Christmas presents, send our Christmas cards, put up our decorations and start feeling festive. If we're lucky enough to have fond memories of Christmas from our childhoods, we try desperately (but always fail) to recapture the magic we once felt, and resign ourselves instead to getting slightly merry and falling asleep in front of the Christmas edition of The Royle Family/ Gavin and Stacey/ Only Fools and Horses/ EastEnders/ Coronation Street (delete as appropriate).

I know this year will be different.

I had a dream a few weeks ago that I was bearing witness to a battle between France and Germany. It was pre-1900, and my British perspective was not stained with "Oh but they're Nazis! Evil ones, die!!!" The French were throwing grenades at the unprotected and unprepared Germans. German soldiers were being burned alive, and their skeletons were dying slowly, painfully. It was painful to witness.

Flash-forward to the year 2012, and I was back at Church (I haven't attended regular old Mass since I was about 11, and my religious beliefs are far from bible-bound, but for some reason I still think of myself as Catholic). I was standing in front of a woman, a regular parishioner, serving rice to homeless people. She looked at me and I instantly recognised her as Jesus. She said to me, "Now you know, you know what you have to do."

I'm not sure that I do know what I have to do, but I know that something has to be done.

This Christmas, thousands of Britons will go without a roof over their heads. Thousands will go without a turkey (and I'm excluding non-Christians and vegetarians like myself from this total); millions are unemployed this Christmas, unable to afford the cheerful and lavish displays you see depicted on TV. We teach our children to believe in a selfless, giving superhero called Father Christmas (or Santa Claus, St. Nick, whatever you wanna call him; and yeah, he is a superhero - flies through the sky and can travel all the way around the world in one night? Not even Fly Emirates can do that), but his distribution of Christmas cheer is far from equal. Tom gets a bike and a Wii and a trampoline and a puppy from Father Christmas; Stacey gets a second-hand doll.

I want to ask you all a question - especially those of you who consider yourself Christian: What is Christmas, really? What does it celebrate? We put a tree up inside our living room, throw tinsel over it and we think we know what it means. We indebt ourselves to massive corporate organisations which exploit underpaid workers so that they can make a fat profit, so that our great-aunt can have a bar of soap which apparently smells like lavendar. We eat so much that we are in pain by the end of the day. We pull crackers, wear stupid hats and tell stupid jokes which make us laugh, not because they're funny, but because they don't even make any sense. Maybe some of us go to church, praise God and then shuffle back home again, back to our brand spanking new laptop or iPod. Do we listen to a single word said at church?  Do we understand, not only what Christmas means, but what Jesus means?

Like I said before, it's been a long time since I last attended Mass - more than a decade, in fact - so I don't want to sit about preaching about something I don't even do myself. I don't ask you to take down the tree before it's even been put up, to not give out presents or cards, to deprive your children of the magic you perhaps once experienced. But what I do ask is this: Consider your beliefs; consider your conscience; consider those who have no one else to consider them.