Well, I didn’t want to offend anyone. Have a scintillating solstice. May your merriment be multicultural. Happy holidays. Deck the halls with sensitivity for hate crimes we have heard on high.

You annoyed yet? During my own childhood Christmases there would always be some moment in the two weeks or so of dark, damp family jollity in which someone, usually me, would be blamed for “spoiling Christmas”. The accusation hung over me like some giant, sharp Christmas-tree bauble until it would inevitably fall.

And this, of course, is also a Christmas tradition. From Scrooge to Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, there’s always been an opportunity not simply to celebrate the birth of Jesus with pagan symbols and vast quantities of food and alcohol, but also to excoriate those who refuse to join in.

And so we have our new Scrooges, and they are much worse than the original. They’re whiny, sensitive pedants who feel that their civil rights have been infringed if a town council puts up a manger scene in the shopping mall. In America, where political correctness was born, these kinds of events are now an annual ritual of a sort.

In some small town someone has issued a writ because a government representative has endorsed an explicitly Christian public display. Most sane people groan, roll their eyes and move on.

The trouble is that, in America, there is an actual serious constitutional issue here that cannot be simply dismissed as idiotic.

Since the first amendment bars government endorsement of any particular religion, Christmas can be a problem.

But the solution that the Supreme Court has come up with is an eminently sensible one. Christian scenes — Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus — are fine on public property, as long as they are accompanied in some way by other non-religious Christmassy thingies.

So Jesus can never be too far away from Santa, or a menorah, or a Nordic pine. We have yet to enjoy the Japanese innovation of actually putting Santa on a cross, but the Supreme Court would surely not object.

It’s not a perfect compromise but it’s good enough. Christmas has always been a weird blend of traditions anyway. It has never been simply a calm reflection on the incarnation.

It has always been a winter solstice festival attached somewhat uncomfortably to a Christian doctrine. That’s why in America in the early days some Puritans banned it outright. Among the first opponents of Christmas were Christians themselves.

In America, moreover, Christmas is not the same kind of universal shutdown as it is in Britain. It wasn’t even a legal holiday for the first century after American independence.