Christmas cards are now arriving. I do not get very many, because I send very few, but I get enough to generalise a little about the iconography. There will be a number of humorous cards, with the jokes predominantly about excess – of both food and alcohol – often involving “Santa”; there will be an assortment of rural scenes with a curiously heavy emphasis on snow: since the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar in 1752 and the generally warmer climate in the last half century the chances of a “white Christmas” have fallen below 15 per cent for most of the United Kingdom, though you would not guess this from the cards. There will be a substantial number of robins and (mysteriously) polar bears and penguins, and numerous Christmas trees, many of them with glue-on glitter.

And then there will be illustrations of the “original” Christmas – the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Many of these will be extremely beautiful paintings, although for reasons I do not fully understand Renaissance artists seem to have had very little clue about neo-natal babies – the Christ child is seldom swaddled warmly and usually (even when breast feeding) appears both overweight and over developed, sitting up, holding his own head up, and blessing people. Others will be more modern approaches to the scene, often done in a sort of faux naïf or pseudo-primitive style. Here the baby will be slightly more convincing and the mother rather less so.