Patrick Comerford
I spent all morning today as Santa Claus at the Christmas Market in Stony Stratford, inviting people to come from the High Street with their children to the market in Market Square.
I was looking very Christmassy indeed this morning – there was no need for a false cotton-wool beard over my truly Santa-length white beard. And Stony Stratford is looking very Christmassy too, with the Christmas Tree lit up in the centre of the Market Square, Christmas lights everywhere on the High Street, Church Street, Market Square and the churchyard, and the shops, pubs and cafés vying competitively with one another with the decorated windows.
This is Middle England at its best. This is community spirit in England at its best. And, I can assure you – despite the scaremongering and the hatred the bigots are trying to stir up – no-one here is trying to cancel Christmas.
‘The UK is fundamentally a Christian country and we will always stand up for Christians and their values, especially at this special time of year’, Sarah Pochin, the Reform UK MP for Runcorn and Helsby, claimed in a Christmas message posted on social media this week.
She alleges employers are stopping employees from coming to work in Christmas jumpers. But in every shop and café I went into in Stony Stratford today, and in the shops I visited in central Milton Keynes yesterday, I was almost blinded by the array and colours of the Christmas jumpers worn by staff and shoppers alike.
She also claims, in the same video clip or reel, that Tesco is selling evergreen trees rather than Christmas trees. However, there is abundant evidence – alongside my own experience – that Tesco has not stopped celebrating Christmas. Instead, dozens of products are marked as Christmas trees on its website, its 2025 Christmas advert and a campaign to encourage shoppers to give Christmas presents to under-privileged children.
‘We are proudly celebrating Christmas at Tesco and have a range of real and artificial Christmas trees in store as part of a wide selection of Christmas products to help our customers celebrate Christmas this year,’ a Tesco spokesperson told Reuters long before Sarah Pochin made and posted her incredulous but provocative claims on Facebook and elsewhere.
Tesco could not have been clearer: ‘This product is described as an 'evergreen tree' to make it clear which type of Christmas tree is inside the box and help customers to distinguish between the many Christmas trees in the range. Elsewhere on the box it is clearly marked that this product is part of our Christmas category.’
But Sarah Pochin has never let the unvarnished truth or the verifiable facts get in the way of the views she wants to foist on others. This is the same Sarah Pochin who was reprimanded in 2018 by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office for misconduct when she was a magistrate and was told her actions ‘fell below the standards expected of a magistrate’; who was called ‘dumb’ by Reform’s Zia Yusuf for using PMQs to call for a ban on the burka; whose claims about anti-social behaviour by immigrants in her constituency were dismissed as untrue by the Cheshire Constabulary; and whose remarks about black people and Asian people in TV advertising were described by Nigel Farage as ‘wrong and ugly’.
She accuses her critics of ‘virtue signalling’. But she’s got it wrong, yet again.
She may be dreaming of a white Christmas, like so many of her party colleagues in Reform, perhaps even an exclusively white Christmas. She’s certainly not talking about the Christian Christmas.
The Christmas tree is not a Christian symbol, nor does it have British origins. Christmas trees have their roots (excuse the pun) in Germanic pagan folklore, and they were first introduced to Britain in 1800 by George III’s German wife Queen Charlotte. The Christmas tree might have been forgotten but for its reintroduced by another German, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, who brought one to Windsor Castle in 1841. It was only thanks to an illustration in The Illustrated London News in 1846 that Christmas trees fashionable in Britain in the 1850s.
Nor is there anything particularly Christian or particularly offensive about Christmas jumpers – apart from taste. Until recent decades, Christmas jumpers were mainly sported by skiers and seen as symbols of luxury. They only became mainstream fashion and evolved into the garish garments and novelty items we know today when the Christmas jumper was popularised first by television presenters and singers in the 1980s and 1990s and then in films like Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) – think of Mark Darcy’s reindeer jumper.
As for all those politicians on the far-right who claim they are going to put Christ back into Christmas, they need to ask when Christ was never in Christmas. English, Greek (Χριστούγεννα) and Albanian (Krishtlindja) are the only European languages I know of that include the name of Christ in the name of Christmas.
The Greek Χριστούγεννα (Christougenna) means ‘Christ’s birth’ and is a combiation of Χριστός (Christos), Christ, and γέννα (génna), meaning birth. Anyone who complains about the abbreviation of Xmas excluding Christ shows an illiteracy beyond belief, and reveals a complete ignorance of both classical Greek and Biblical Greek.
Christmas is Noël in French, Natale in Italian, Natal in Portuguese, Nollaig in Irish, and Navidad in Spanish, all words related to birth or nativity; Jul in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish; Crăciun in Romanian; and Vánoce in Czech, Ziemassvētki in Latvian, Kalėdos in Lithuanian and Weihnachten in German. There is no mention of Christ in any of these names, so there no far-right chants about the equivalent of putting Christ.
Given the affinity some of the loudest far-right voices have with a certain brand of German politician in the 1930s and 1940s, it’s a wonder they don’t advocate a phrase similar to Weihnachten instead of talking about putting Christ back into Christmas. But demanding to put the ‘Holy’ back into Holy Night might be too sobering a thought, too pious an idea for the sort of people who dismiss all talk of peace and love in this world as being ‘woke’.
Sarah Pochin claims in that social media reel that ‘the UK is fundamentally a Christian country.’ Why is it that when some people link the word Christian with words such as fundamental and fundamentalist, I expect there to be more emphasis on things that are ‘mental’ than on the ‘fun’? I then remind myself that was the 17th century equivalent our present-day fundamentalists, those over-zealous and judgmental Puritans, who outlawed Christmas, not Muslims or immigrants.
But if we are going to go back to fundamentals, we might begin with an early Biblical passage: ‘When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God’ (Leviticus 19: 33-34).
Or, perhaps, we might talk of putting the message of Christ and Christian values back into Christmas. We could start by wishing for peace on earth and good will to all, by remembering that Christ was born into a migrant family began life as a refugee as a young child. We could remind ourselves how he said, ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25: 35), that he calls us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and that the best answer to who is my neighbour is found in an outsider, from another ethnic group with different religious beliefs.
And while we’re at it, we could even bring ‘Mass’ back into ‘Christ-Mass’ too. Instead of criticising the labelling and pricing of Christmas or evergreen trees, putting on silly Christmas jumpers, or snogging under the mistletoe at the office party, it would be good to see these people in Church, and taking to heart the Christmas sermons that put Christ and Christian values back into daily life.
