When I was a child I was puzzled by my father’s refusal to celebrate Christmas. He is a Jehovah’s Witness and would spend Christmas Day knocking on doors and pronouncing the “good news of the kingdom”, while the rest of the country feasted on turkey and mince pies.

To anyone who asked, I would repeat verbatim my father’s explanations. Christmas, I’d tell them imperiously, had its origins in pagan festivals. “And the Bible says shepherds were in the fields, so Jesus wasn’t born in December anyway,” I’d tell confounded classmates.

Yet even by the age of seven or eight, I considered the reasoning a bit spurious. The lights in the windows and the twinkling trees all just looked pretty to me. I once summoned the