Oh come, all ye faithful shoppers

HOPEFULLY this won’t sound too much a Winterval v Christmas rant (We’ll leave that one to man of the people 2006 winner Jack Straw) but something rather special happened yesterday.

I got a Christmas card. I may be a Billy No Mates at times, but I still do get Christmas cards, and had already received several. But this one was different – and it took me a minute to work out why.

Then it dawned on me. It was vaguely religious. It depicted the stable in which Jesus was born. Ten Christmas cards in for 2006 and it was the first one which reminded the person receiving it that it was actually a religious festival.

Are so many people really just ignoring the real meaning of Christmas and intentionally plumping for ones of penguins and polar bears? Even Santa, that commercially-created icon of the 20th century, appears to be being pushed out at the moment.

The card also reminded me that it was time for me to buy some cards (having resisted the buy two, get one free deals that were on last month on the grounds it was only November).

And the answer to the question I posed in the paragraph above the last one soon unveiled itself once I was inside Tesco. Despite being large enough to stock a dozen types of TV, at least 10 versions of a Chicken sandwich and enough pairs of shoes to keep a certain famed south American leader’s wife happy for years, it didn’t have a single religious card.

Or indeed, religious wrapping. The nearest I got to Father Christmas was wrapping with the word Jingle on it. Modern chic or what? So I asked the Tesco assistant, whose attitude suggested he had only recently worked for Asda (I assume that’s where they learn that ‘don’t look at the customer, and sneer at them when they speak’ look anyway). His response: That’s all we’ve got.

Now, getting four words out of him was an achievement. But hardly conclusive in terms of getting my answer. So let’s just assume that’s all they stock.

I don’t really mind how people celebrate Christmas. For me, it’ll be midnight mass on Christmas Eve, open presents in the morning, work in the afternoon (that’s the really festive bit when me and someone else sit around the newsdesk eating turkey sandwiches for three hours hoping a news story will break to help fill five live news pages for the Boxing Day edition of the paper which we know all the readers will appreciate) and then back home.

But surely in this country, it shouldn’t be too much to expect the UK’s largest retailer (£1 in every 8 etc) to stock Christmas cards with something relating to baby Jesus? I know it’s a petty thing to get wound up about, but as they say it Tesco, every little helps. And when it comes to commercialism, it’s one thing to cash in on the birth of Christ, another to sideline him altogether…