There is much we can learn from the ancient traditions of Winterval, each culture’s festive myths and rituals being equally valid, and equally instructive, irrespective of their veracity or worth.

Upon the solstice night in Latveria, for example, Pappy Puffklap leaves a dried clump of donkey excrement on the breakfast table of each home. Is this so very different from the wise kings bringing the infant Christ sealed flagons of foul-smelling gas, the divine in harmony with the physical at its most pungent?

There is only really one story this Christmas. The snow that decorates your cards will soon be a half-remembered folk myth. The arctic ice sheet is melting from underneath as well as above now. Did you notice, or were you grime-dancing to Man’s Not Hot at an office Christmas party, the annual arse-photocopier roped off with “police line do not cross” tape, management confused by the exact nature of their legal responsibilities to staff buttocks in the current social recalibrations?

My own Christmas sounds a note of doom. So far, I have escaped ownership of a smartphone or a tablet. With a deserved sense of superiority, I have watched the rest of you degenerate into being no-attention-span zombie scum, fixated on trivial fruit-based games and the capture of invisible Japanese imps, entirely unaware of the geography of your own surroundings, info-pigs gobbling bites of fake news headfirst from shiny troughs 24 hours a day, while our decaying planet performs its last few million fatal, and yet still beautiful, rotations before you.

The screens of the iPhones of proud parents, their heads respectfully bowed, displayed pages from Facebook and Twitter

But now I must become one of you. Having abandoned paper letters, and now declaring even email obsolete, my nine-year-old daughter’s school has told me I need an iPhone to receive any administrative communication. And so, with a heavy heart, I have asked for one for Christmas, a shire horse begging for harness, a hamster requesting its own torturous wheel, Robert Lindsay asking for another series of My Family.

But perhaps, like Jesus renouncing his divinity to become a mortal, finally owning an iPhone will help me to understand Observer readers, and the trivial concerns and inundations of ignorance that drive you in your futile lives. Beneath a powerful enough microscope, even a cluster of wriggling threadworm can be beautiful.

I accepted my iPhone destiny on the morning of last Wednesday, but by the afternoon I wanted to renounce it. I attended the carol service of my niece’s nursery school. Upon each carved pew, the screens of the iPhones of proud parents, their heads respectfully bowed, displayed pages from Facebook and Twitter, and twinkled throughout the ancient religious ritual like the stars that led the wise men to the very cradle of Christ.

As the lights dimmed and the candles flared up for a beautiful choral arrangement of the Coventry Carol, the assembled infant singers could look up and see that many of the grownups in the room, their lowered faces lit beatifically from below by the Caravaggio glow of their iPhone screens, were not the slightest fucking bit interested in them or their stupid fucking song.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

This is of course a valuable preparation for adult life, where dreams are crushed and hope and pride are trampled in the dirt. Nothing says “Christmas” like orchestrated mass indifference to the creative efforts of small children, I always think.

In my own line of work, as Britain’s most consistently critically acclaimed standup comedian, I take a hard line against in-show mobile phone usage. If I spot a screen lighting up from the stage I leap into the aisle, wrestle it from the offender’s grasp, and put it down the back of my pants.

Here, clenched in the smallest fissure of my cavity by one of its corners, the phone remains until the end of the three-hour show, before being handed back to its owner in a sealed jiffy bag, its screen ideally complete with tell-tale smears.

I appreciate that this course of action is not appropriate for the headmaster of an infant school during a Christmas carol service, but he would probably only need to do it once for it to take permanent effect. And it would certainly be discussed on Mumsnet.

Christmas continues to educate me. The following day I dropped my seven-year-old son off at school while absentmindedly still wearing the elf jumper my sarcastic wife had hatefully bought me. Knitted legs dangle down from the waist, making me look like a morbidly obese Yule sprite.

It was assumed that I had arrived to replace an absent elf for the children’s Christmas party and, too embarrassed to explain otherwise, I soon found myself in Santa’s grotto in an inappropriate security guard stance, policing suspicious toddlers.

Afterwards, as they ate cake, I listened, in my undercover elf capacity, to the children rationalise their Santa experience. They concluded that the Santa they had seen wasn’t the real Santa, but that Santa did exist, and that he had been merely a representative Santa, the real one being too busy, obviously, to make school visits.

Psychiatrists call the balancing of contradictory facts cognitive dissonance. With regard to the Christmas beliefs, these children’s dissonance was certainly cognitive beyond their years. With regard to leaving the EU, Boris Johnson’s cognitive dissonance found form as the notion of having your cake and eating it, but his cognition was swiftly undissonated, the cake neither had nor eaten.

Some precocious girls had even got as far as explaining that Santa’s sledge would not be covered by the same air traffic agreements that may make European air travel more complex post-Brexit, because it was magic. And so Christmas 2019 deliveries should function as normal.

Children that disagreed were swiftly denounced as traitors, and saboteurs of Christmas. Luckily my accidental elf status gave me a John Bercow-style authority, and I was just able to mediate between the realists and those that would condemn them. Even Santa brought me back to the spectre of Brexit.

Last week, in a gift shop on Oxford Street, I bought my Scandinavian sister-in-law the Christmas present of a mass-produced commemorative mug, which declared on its side that it was “celibrating” (sic) the forthcoming royal wedding.

Now, every time she raises her hot mug of Christmas glogg, she and her fellow Vikings will celibrate the marriage of Harry and Meghan with the respect it deserves. Even working in a second language, the Scandinavian spotted immediately the spelling error that had escaped our highly trained royal ceramics taskforce. The fine detail of post-Brexit paperwork will be an exciting challenge for small British businesses. Merry Christmas.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is in London until 3 February and continues to tour in 2018