It’s the morning after the night before. I've woken with a hangover and the weather is awful. The summer sky is a sullen grey and a mean wind is tormenting the trees outside my window. 

Luckily my hangover is of the utterly pleasant kind: instead of nausea and headache I’m feeling an unusual equanimity about life, and all I'm suffering is a severe case of goodwill towards my fellow human beings. 

There’s a fortune to be made if someone can just figure out how to manufacture and bottle this sweet feeling of harmony and connectedness. 

Things like the cost of electricity, mowing the lawn, interest rates, what the prime minister said, and how there’s nothing decent on TV. When you’re a kid, you are surrounded by people with wrinkles and grey hair who grunt when they lever themselves into or out of armchairs. As a kid, you are interested in very old things - dinosaurs for example - but you are not particularly interested in old people. The thought that one day you might become one of them seems wildly improbable. 

And then one day you find yourself at a party discussing your acute or chronic health issues with a group of friends who look awfully like … well … old people. They've got wrinkles and graying hair and so have you. That’s when you realise that a lifetime isn't quite as long as you had once supposed. 

The just-released results of the 2013 census show that fewer New Zealanders identify as Christian than ever before. Growing numbers of us are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. Many of us confess no religious belief at all. Rugby and the America’s Cup probably inspire more zealotry in New Zealand than any God. Which means that few of us believe that a supernatural birth occurred in Bethlehem on the 25th of December 2013 years ago. 
Santa is the real God of modern Christmas. Images of the baby Jesus in a stable are displayed in shop windows almost interchangeably with images of Santa wreathed in holly and unreasonable, unseasonable snow. 
I imagine that some kids these days are so confused that they think it’s baby Santa they see napping in the hay. They may well think that the baby, grown paunchy and whiskery with age, has simply moved to cooler climes and swapped his swaddling clothes for red, fur-trimmed long-johns.