Down in Exeter, a primary school teacher has just received a special gift-wrapped seasonal reprimand. Summoning all the specialist training at her disposal, though precious little of her common sense, she decided it would be educational to eradicate the fat bloke in the red suit once and for all from the minds of a class of nine-year-olds.

Santa Claus, she said - somehow one imagines "primly" - is merely mythological. What's more, all those earnest letters her pupils had dispatched to the North Pole were being answered by the Royal Mail. Wouldn't it be a fun exercise for the class to invent a few imaginary replies of their own? (Briefly: no, miss.) Put aside the defamatory nature of the aspersions cast on Mr Claus. What's fun about trauma when you're nine? Come to that, what's the fun of being a teacher discovering just how indignant parents can be? Lynchings are not festive, but in Exeter, reportedly, it was a close-run thing.

It is interesting, though, that the charge of mythical status was regarded as conclusive. Few things are as real as a good myth. Carl Jung spent averylongtimeboringpeopletodeathon the subject.Humanityhaslivedanddiedforits mythology for millennia. Some people still swear by, and kill for, old myths for which the corroborating evidence is thin-to-invisible.

In those stakes, the bearded one is better than harmless. He promises and, as often as not, he delivers. He counsels against antisocial behaviour. His cult meanwhile lacks the baggage typical of his competitors. As Marilyn Monroe once said, in a slightly different context: "If I'm gonna be a symbol, I'd rather be a symbol for sex than some of the other things they've got symbols for."

I have no grounds for the suspicion, but I would not be too surprised if the Exeter teacher happens to possess religious faith. Having purloined the year's end from the pagans, the churches grow tetchy at the relentless transformation of their stolen festival and the elevation of old fatso. This is not because their "message" has been lost entirely. Watch Night services are packed with nominal Christians making their annual visit to churchprecincts.Themediaarealsofullof dutiful,ifill-conceived,allusionstospiritual dimensions and such.

What bugs believers, it seems, is the suspicion that the binge is bigger now than any Christian festival. The papers have been full of pastors over the past fortnight complaining about stories, usually apocryphal, of councils "banning" Christmas. The Sun - choose your company carefully, I always say - has even run a supportive campaign. In the United States, meanwhile, the no-news news is of complaints against the spread of "the holidays" as an inclusive, non-specific term.

The commercialised Christmas has no meaning, say the religious. It promotes all and every excess, naked greed, and gross materialism. Most people cannot even say what it is they think they are celebrating as they risk debt and obesity. In fact, it all looks a bit pagan, the old, ungovernable Saturnalia.

Idon'tmuchcareforChristmasshopping myself. I grow a little weary of hip hop Santas and festive computer-game massacres, of compulsory boozing, houses decorated like bad 1970s discos, and the feeling that all this and more is obligatory. Iamveryfond,though,ofathree-year-old nephew who has spent weeks trying to work out tonight's access routes to an Edinburgh flat for a portly gent with a big sack. I like a twinkling tree. And part of me not only accepts but welcomes the fact that I can't quite say what any of it is truly for. I don't want it to be "for" something.

I can see part of the Christian point. There is, to be fair, something of a gulf between your standard yuletide marketing exercise and one who sacrificed himselftosaveallmankind.Mytraditional Christmas twinges over the starving, the dying and the dispossessed who get no annual break from suffering barely stack up in comparison. On the other hand, the Christian faith needs to be a little more honest. The event on which it depends, the underpinning of all it proclaims, happens at Easter. Let the doubters and the backsliders have their sentimentality and their sprouts.

Most of us know that our Santa was invented by the Coca-Cola Company. The older European models are somewhat earthier, a little wilder, somewhat closer to ideas of seasonal rebirth and natural fecundity, but why scare the infants? It no longer matters that Charles Dickens would have been baffled by the man in the red suit. It is no longer relevant, save for sentiment's sake, to observethatwithinlivingmemoryScotland treated Christmas as just another working day, and held to Hogmanay.

My nephew is half-Spanish. This works well for him most of the time, but especially as December 25 draws close. He can double his bets: anything Claus fails to deliver the Three Kings will surely provide. A smart kid in two languages. His mother, though, is slightly dismayed by the ever-expanding empire of the big red one as it encroaches on the lives of Spanish villages where he has no traditional base, squeezing out the old ways. All over Europe and beyond, similar stories are told.

What are we celebrating, precisely? What is the profound religious significance of an iPod or a gift voucher? What is the modern Christmas worth if it amounts to nothing more than gorging, stress, boozing and bankruptcy? These are not original questions, but the answers might be worth a hearing.

The modern Christmas is not, whatever they say, a kind of technologically enabled paganism. Wacky they may be, but pagans subscribe to a clear belief system. It is as coherent (this is not saying much) as any. It does not involve worship at the Tesco shrine, or the conviction that there will be hell on Earth should the teenager fail to receive hisDVD.Paganismdoesnotrelymuchon material goods in astounding quantities.

Yet that, of course, is another charge laid at the grotto door: unspeakable, shallow materialism. Strangely, or not so strangely, this is one you tend to hear most from people who know where their next free-range goose and ski trip are coming from.ThefamiliesbetrayedbyFarepakare perhaps entitled to their own worldly view. Where's the harm in being able to take control of your circumstances, if only for a day or two? There are a lot of kids for whom it does self-evident good to be told that, just for once, they can have a little of what they want. There are a lot of parents, too, who have worked long and hard for the fleeting satisfaction of that moment.

But of course they overdo it, don't they? They stuff themselves like factory fowl. They talk of family and turn this into the season to be squabbling. They do somethingelse,though:theyallow themselves a little dream, for a moment or an hour. They step into a cartoon fantasy in which all problems can be solved. In the process, they allow themselves to believe that some real problems can be solved without guilt, or contradictory theology, or too many dark thoughts on that old, persistent human condition.

It is no small thing. Eat well, keep warm, think about children, and hope against hope: not bad, Mr C. The triumph of the flashy, frantic modern Christmas lies with the many millions who will not be lectured on what is right, proper, tasteful, respectful or sensible. Some are disappointed, or disappoint themselves: this, too, is excess, sad and grotesque. But if they wish only to wallow in a supremely silly movie, or risk intestinal troubles, or pretend to care about the relatives, they still ask a question of their own: what's so bad about that?

I feel the ghost of Mr Dickens and sundry other cornballs. They say that the only meaning of Christmas is the meaning you make for yourself. It is personal, not dictated, whether by chain stores or chain churches. It has lost all definition, all ordained significance: I conceded that much a long time ago. Yet such, perversely, is the value of the thing. Choose any faith or none, any holy rite or daft little family tradition. The man in the beard smiles on all. He makes you a gift of it. Non-returnable, but real.