In the strict Catholic tradition, Christmas was not accorded the popular significance it now generates, especially after the Victorian and Dickensian revivals.

In fact, compared to Easter and Pentecost, Christmas does not have an Octave following it, so much so that the day after Christmas we celebrate St Stephen’s Day.

For many centuries, Christmas was relegated among the other feasts. Actually, historians tell us, the day was ‘borrowed’ from pagan religions and has nothing to do with the actual day that Christ was born.

It was only much later that Christmas became what we have today. The tree, (counterbalanced by St Francis’ crib), the falling snow, the Victoriana so evident in many cards even today, the whole atmosphere of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol created the myth-laden celebration we have today.

This is, more or less, where tradition has left us. The crowds of people out to enjoy themselves, the lights, the rounds of parties and late nights – all this we remember from our youth and still hold strong today.

But increasingly, and especially this year, this tradition is failing to kindle the same atmosphere it used to bring about in previous years.

At Christmas the Christians celebrate the baby born in conditions of abject poverty to two unmarried parents away from their home because they had to obey the dictate of the Roman occupier.

Christians believe that baby to be the Son of God.

Shorn of the tinsel and hagiography, the core event of Christmas is the birth of a baby to two Palestinian refugees in conditions of poverty.

It should have been easy to make the connection between this event and what we have seen this year – the interminable procession of refugees from Syria crossing over, till this very day, to Europe, in conditions of hardship, pushed here or there by the many governments of the day.

The resemblance does not stop there. The original Christmas event is a sign of hope in the middle of a disaster, such as what the Prophet Isaiah foresaw in the birth of a baby in the middle of the collapse of the Jewish people.

Yet unfortunately, it would seem that the vast majority of Christians have not made the connection. They do not see the Baby of Betlehem in the vast amounts of children who have made the pilgrimage through the frontiers of Syria, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Hungary, Slovenia, to Austria and Germany.

The rapid victories and spread of  Isis and the Paris attacks have conditioned the peoples of the West to such an extent that peoples like the Hungarians and the Slovaks, precisely because they are Christians, have closed their countries to the refugees from Syria without even understanding the contradiction involved.

There is no doubt, either, that the vast majority of Christians in the rest of Europe, and also among us, feel this way without understanding the contradiction either.

Fortunately, there are a few examples that make a huge contrast. The actions of Pope Francis are one. So too the action of Archbishop Scicluna who on Friday breaks with a long-standing tradition of celebrating Pontifical Mass in the ornate beauty of St John’s to celebrate Christmas Mass at the Corradino Correctional Facility.

But these are too few examples in a sea of forced jollity, commercial exasperation and an orgy of eating, drinking and carousing.