Christmas is – obviously – terrible. In fact Christmas is so terrible the only interesting thing about this observation is the follow-up question of exactly how it got so terrible in the first place. In my opinion this state of terrible-ness is the result of recent decisive victories in the struggle between Christmas’s two dominant figures: Santa Claus and Jesus Christ.

Basically, Jesus is taking a battering out there.

I’m not talking about the old pre‑modern Jesus here: Victorian Jesus, who was strident, militant – frankly, a bit, you know, Christian – and who to be fair had a lot of success in his time. I’m talking about recent Jesus, 1970s Jesus, essentially a nice bearded man who plays the guitar and believes in recycling and coffee shop book-share schemes and who doesn’t even particularly believe in God, except maybe as a kind of vague force like the internet or trance music.

It is this mild, fair-trade Jesus who has been absolutely turned over in recent years by the bellowing alpha male in the red-suited corner, the decidedly dubious figure of Santa Claus, with his fundamentalist consumerism, his sweatshop values, his great sagging sack crammed with plastic tat, his bellowing contagion of appetite. Right now Santa is dominating, marching Jesus around the car park in a half-nelson, scragging him by the dreadlocks, flinging presents, swigging Drambuie, spraying that thin white kindly neck with the hot spittle of his booming ho, ho, hos.