Finally, something’s made me feel festive

I ADMIT that my heart sinks when the decorations go up and the seasonal jingles start in October, or neighbours put wreaths on the door before November is out. But some things lift the spirits.

Thanksgiving, when Americans fly home from all over the world to be together for feasting and family, with no presentgiving, is one. The pizza restaurant Bada Bing! in Springfield, Ohio, which closed but stuck a sign on the door saying if you were poor and hungry please come in, ‘we will welcome you and make sure you get plenty to eat’, is another, as is the woman who left a newborn baby in the nativity manger in a New York church.

All the above left me in a puddle of sentiment and goodwill. It made me feel Christmassy – even Christian – for the first time, like, for ever. Someone tell Richard Curtis and Emma Freud, who are in the Big Apple with their four children, to snap up the film rights to the fairytale baby in a manger ASAP, or I will. Oh yes, and while we’re on the subject: I can think of only one possible reason for cinemas to ban the ad for the Lord’s Prayer before screenings of Star Wars. The head honchos of the cinema chains are clearly Jedi Knights. As adherents of the nation’s fourth-biggest religion (there are 390,000 of them, according to census data), the Knights are reluctant to allow captive viewers to be exposed to an incantatory commercial for a rival religion even bigger than The Force.