THE English are a practical people – unlike the intellectual French, their heads full of theories. There is a true story about when the French magazine Paris Match asked three important men, who happened to be in Paris at the same time, what they would like for Christmas.

Mikhail Gorbachev said he would like an end to the arms race; Ronald Reagan said he wanted peace on earth; the British Ambassador refused to answer the question. The journalist said: “But the Presidents of America and Russia have told me what they would like for Christmas.” The British Ambassador said: “Oh all right – I’d like a small box of crystallised fruits, please.” He was right. Not only was his request more modest: it was the only one of the three that might possibly be supplied.

So when you ponder the wonder of Christmas Day, don’t let your mind stray into abstractions – the so called meaning of Christmas. Think instead of the things we associate with Christmas and you will get a better understanding of the Festival.

I have a friend, a priest, who phoned me up to tell me about a pleasing expedition he had made into Spain recently. He said: “The whole town square was taken over by crib-sellers. Large cribs, big as your car; small ones to put on the sideboard. Lovely, tangible, evocative, Christmassy.”

To get to the reality of Christmas, don’t remove yourself into some distant position from where to enjoy high-minded spiritual reflections. Enter into the world of Christmas things.

The child understands this. That’s why we say Christmas is a time for children. Set up a game with a child and he won’t ask you for meanings: he’ll enter its world and regard it as reality.

Tell the nativity story to young children and they don’t start asking whether it’s true: they’re far too busy dressing up as Mary and Joseph, sticking a paper star on a velvet curtain and making models of the lowing cattle. They are nearer to Christmas than the theologians.

Children can take religion neat. It’s the adults who are sceptical and squeamish. The child, first presented with the story of the birth of Jesus simply accepts it. The child enters a world. The adult wants to understand – as if the miraculous birth were on a par with the differential calculus. The child allows himself to be imaginatively possessed by it. The adult wants an explanation. The child enters the mystery. You must become as a little child.

I grew up in the back streets of Leeds just after the war.

My granddad had two newsagents’ shops between the gas works and the jail – about a quarter of a mile apart. Christmas Eve was the busiest time, selling toys.

In the bleak midwinter of 1947 – Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps and snow piled high for months on end – I was five and was given the Christmas Eve job of carrying messages between the two shops. I still can’t get the magic of it out of my head. Walking down the middle of the deserted road. Pinpricks of frost on the gravel like a reflection of the starry night. I had a red scarf and I used to be told off for sucking the end of it. I had a paper bag of cocoa and sugar – replenished after each trip. As I walked through the darkness among the lighted windows, I heard in my head the whole time Hark the Herald Angels Sing. I knew then I was caught in the jaws of the Hound of Heaven.