We removed God from parliament's prayer this year as proof of our lack of belief in anything more powerful than ourselves, replacing him with crank diets and airy claims of Buddhism and spirituality, which may link with astrology for all I know.
The main thing is, you don't have to go to church. It may be a novelty to Christian converts in China, but not to us.
In declaring Christmas to be Western mental opium, the Henyang people – and Karl Marx - are and were completely mistaken.
Opium, I gather, was a pleasant, dreamy experience, and Christmas is never that. We should start calling it Family Day.
That's closer to the mark, with all the unrelaxing idea of family annoyances it entails.
You have to reach back a long way to believe Christmas is a totally happy event. I was probably about four.
There were lollies, my uncle's Wairarapa College sock filled with small toys, and an orange at the very bottom of that schoolboy Christmas stocking. My grandmother was in charge of this gift from Santa.
The orange belonged in her childhood, really, when Star Wars and Lego didn't yet exist.
Like all wise children I believed in Father Christmas, obviously the star of the show, and didn't yet notice that the gift-wrapping papers were carefully folded and recycled year after year, gradually becoming as soft as tissue paper.
But time changes everything.
It makes you aware of undercurrents in your family that end in sudden shouting and sulking, old jealousies reignited and ancient wars revisited. That's the trouble with bringing back together people who've moved away, have changed, and maybe never liked each other in the first place.
Yet there is a feeling of obligation that draws people together at this time of year in the hope that this time it will be all Disney, with wise words from the elderly, and the icky cuteness of small children, a rare outpouring of affection from parents who never praised you, and the inevitable babies vomiting down their mothers' frocks.
A key element of Christmas celebrations in many families is the feud, revitalised annually. Rather than respecting old people, it's an opportunity to remind them of their shortcomings.
Parents have plenty of those, because they never get childrearing right, while their adult children feel blameless and hard done by.
This is not the Holy Family we were once invited to adore. Being holy, they would have better manners.
It won't be long before the planning of next Christmas begins, maybe next week.
Women are in charge of this, it brings out their bossiness. I blame the women's magazines they devour, full of celebrities in silly Santa hats offering revolting holiday recipes, along with confessions about their weight/marriage/latest illness/pregnancies, and my personal favourite, "baby joy".
No celebrity experiences anything other than joy as they procreate, which of course is the whole deal about the birth of Jesus we have just celebrated in some vague way to do with singing carols.
Like many children, he had a hard time of it, let alone the many baby boys who were killed on Herod's orders in an attempt to eradicate the expected saviour – Jesus, read the book – in his infancy, before he caused trouble. Which of course he did.
We'll be remembering that at Easter, the festival of chocolate eggs and shooting bunnies in Central Otago that was once a religious observance too.
Maybe the Chinese communists are right. Mental opium could explain our collective confusion.
