Why aren’t we allowed to talk about Christmas any more? For that’s the question we’re all asking ourselves, surely, in between ordering the turkey and hanging the Advent calendar.

Why is there not more Christmas in my life, I ask myself plaintively, while cobbling together an emergency nativity play costume at midnight? Why are the forces of political correctness so cruelly suppressing all references to it, leaving us barely two months of the year to enjoy reindeer jumpers and piped-carol muzak in all the shops and giant Christmas trees outside parliament? Why, you’d barely know it was Christmas time at all.

Thank goodness, then, that the equality and human rights commission and the prime minister are on the case. The commission’s new chair David Isaac boldly declared this week that employers should realise it’s “OK to hold a party and to send Christmas cards” without fear of offending other faiths, just in case anyone was wondering whether the religious nature of the average office Christmas party could prove divisive. And questioned on the issue in the Commons this week, Theresa May said solemnly that people at work certainly should “feel able to speak quite freely about Christmas”. Who knew, eh, that so many Britons had been so cruelly oppressed just for trying to organise an office secret Santa?

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Unfortunately what you’ve just read is precisely the sort of smart-alec liberal elitist response that’s proved so resoundingly popular and electorally successful this year. Like a doctor responding to a wholly imaginary complaint – the perennial rightwing fantasy that someone somewhere is trying to kill Christmas – May was prescribing a placebo, a soothing assurance that the thing that isn’t happening anyway, definitely shouldn’t happen.

It offends every liberal instinct going, because it’s pandering to an imaginary problem rather than confronting it head-on. But the uncomfortable question it poses is – what’s your better plan, exactly?

I have every sympathy with Christians who feel commercialisation is squeezing the religious meaning out of Christmas, and still more so with those worried by the murderous persecution of Christians overseas. But that’s not what drives the complaints about school PTAs renaming their Christmas fundraisers “winter fayres”. The latter is the political equivalent of moaning about having to cater for a vegetarian at Christmas lunch; it’s an irritable reaction to being asked to adapt to the presence and beliefs of others, which has precious little to do with the Christian ideal of loving one’s neighbour.

It’s infuriating, but arguing with this kind of vague cultural anxiety is like boxing shadows or punching smoke. You can’t rationalise something that is impervious to reason, and liberals ought to know that, because we’ve been trying unsuccessfully to do it for years.

When people first started grumbling that they weren’t allowed to talk about immigration any more, sometimes even while being interviewed at length on national media about immigration, liberals responded by pouncing gleefully on errors of fact or with mockery. We thought that if you didn’t punch the smoke you were ceding ground to extremists, and we may well have been right. But nonetheless, we all know how that movie ended; with a room full of smoke.

‘Bah, humbug to the idea that anyone is killing Christmas.’ Photograph: Alamy

As a journalist, I am not willing to let go of the belief that facts are sacred, and that misunderstandings or untruths exist to be countered. But nor am I blind to the fact that politicians operate in a different world from journalists.

If the facts were wobbly and anecdotes exaggerated, the pretence that debate was being silenced was basically code for something harder to dismiss: feelings about change, loss of control, and the world moving on without their permission. There was undoubtedly racism mixed into it, but also a lot of vague generalised anxiety and innate conservatism. And the same is true now of the imaginary threat to Christmas.

What May said was in itself fairly meaningless, because there’s nothing meaningful to say about a nonexistent problem. (For any Christians genuinely discriminated against on grounds of their beliefs, there is already recourse in law.) And fighting culture wars in this way does leave politicians looking a little like adults at a toddler tea party, gravely pretending to drink nonexistent tea from an empty cup. But even that game has, deep down, a purpose. The toddler knows the cup is empty really, but it’s gratifying to be taken seriously by a grownup, and that strengthens the bond between them.

If the intention is to build trust and thus get a hearing for the more thoughtful things May has said in the past about religious plurality and respect for all faiths – well, maybe it’s not the liberal way, but liberals are not in power any more. The risk, however, in playing tea parties on a national scale is that you’re playing with millions of toddlers at once, and not all of them understand the tea isn’t real.

Whenever politicians position themselves as standing up for Christmas, some will almost certainly interpret that as asserting the supremacy of Christianity over minority faiths and by extension of minorities themselves, even though May pointedly mentioned the “very strong tradition in this country of religious tolerance”.

But many others will simply hear a vaguely reassuring message that Christmas isn’t about to change; a promise to defend overcooked sprouts and snowball fights, O Come All Ye Faithful and grandchildren being forced to write proper thankyou cards rather than beastly emails. The fact that none of these things are particularly endangered doesn’t matter; what her target voters hear is that she values the same things they do, and crucially that she isn’t laughing at them. It’s the political equivalent of what relationship counsellors call mirroring, or defusing a row by calmly repeating what your furious partner says back at them, rather than getting defensive (or offensive) in return.

But even mirroring is only meant to be a way of calming things down, so that you can rationally discuss who does the chores in future. Currently rightwing politicians have been tremendously good at mirroring voters’ fear of change right back at them, and the left has been much better at rationally dissecting the way forward, but nobody is particularly excelling at doing both.

So bah, humbug to the idea that anyone is killing Christmas. But perhaps liberals need to find a way of saying so that doesn’t sound quite so contemptuously Scrooge-like.