Paul Little: 'Tis the season for friends and family

Oprah came, and patronised. AP

It seems odd that atheists even bother with Christmas. Surely we should ignore it and sit at home congratulating ourselves on our intellectual superiority. Well, I can't speak for Richard Dawkins - like I could get a word in - but most of us love it.

Christmas, like a lot of Christianity and most other religions, has values and virtues that don't require belief in an imaginary friend in the sky to appreciate. "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you?" Good one, Jesus. "The mind is everything: what you think you become." Food for thought, Buddha. "When you see a person who has been given more than you in money and beauty, look to those who have been given less." Have you just been in New Zealand, Mohammad?

I don't mind being wished a happy Christmas. And I'd be surprised if many refugees, who were recently offered official protection from that invocation, did. They almost certainly want to accommodate themselves to the ways of their new home. That's only polite.

If I were in India and invited to a Diwali celebration, for example, I'd expect my hosts to be upfront. I'd want them to tell me we would be celebrating the spiritual victory of light over dark commencing on the day supernatural beings formed the goddess Lakshmi out of an ocean of cosmic milk. "Goodness, these laddoos are delicious," I would say politely.

I'd feel patronised if they said, "We'd love you to come to, er, our event. Yes, we're having an event and you should definitely attend. There will be eating and merriment. Nothing special. Not an acknowledgement of a millennia-old superstition at all. Just a good opportunity to focus on friends and family."

A bit like Christmas.

The good things about Christmas - and there are many, from forcible re-encounters with family members to getting some cool stuff to enjoying children's contagious excitement, to having an excuse to stop and do something loving for those you love, even if that is no more than putting on some food - don't require you to be Christian.

Likewise, when you look at the extremes of religious acting-out around the world - Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka using violence to re-establish ethnic dominance, Christians in the US using automatic weapons to cleanse the earth of sinners, Muslims in Syria torturing people for dramatic effect - it's obvious that you don't have to be an atheist to believe in the concept of peace on earth and goodwill to all people. But it does make it a lot easier.

I wasn't expecting much from Oprah Winfrey but I wasn't expecting anything quite as patronising and platitudinous as we got from the Queen of the Greeting Card Philosophers.

We almost lost control of our national bladder when she stopped to chat to Maori TV's Te Kaea reporter Rewa Harriman at Orakei marae. After all, Oprah speaks so rarely on television it was an occasion to be treasured.

The message she brought to New Zealand, she said, was that people should live their lives to the fullest. I'd never thought of that before. But, she went on: "As I've been around New Zealand, I think I can go home now - I think everybody's already doing that here ... As a culture and as a people, in terms of understanding what matters, family, tradition, values, I think New Zealanders, Kiwis, have it."

How we purred. There was more in this vein but when you looked closely it was an all-purpose, your-country's-name-here monologue that could have been spoken with as much relevance anywhere in the world. And probably has been.