Whenever Boris Johnson expresses “absolute confidence”, the heart sinks. As we know, the PM’s “absolute confidence” – usually accompanied by the slamming down of a fist and a rueful grin – inevitably precedes the immediate cancellation of whatever we’re being assured will go ahead “as normal,” “as expected”, “as planned”.

In this case, it’s Christmas. Which is baffling. Not so much because of omicron – though if we’ve learnt one thing over the past 20 months, it’s surely not to make promises we can’t keep? – as the fact that Christmas was cancelled years ago.

Well before civil servants blocked the word from their efforts to avert a winter Covid crisis for “fear it would offend minority religions”, before the slogan “Don’t take Covid home for Christmas” was vetoed by Cabinet Office officials preparing a publicity blitz on students before they returned to their families and before schools and businesses were urged to replace the word either with the Americanism “holidays” or the equally amorphous “festive season”, C——-s had been bleeped out of British culture.

In this cowardly green and pleasant land, Christians don’t just figure low down on the offence barometer – they don’t figure at all. They are not allowed to feel offence. So when, in a leaked email sent last Thursday, a Whitehall official wrote “We have been advised by the Cabinet Office that we should not use the word Christmas – as the Government campaign needs to be inclusive and some religions don’t celebrate Christmas”, with another attempting to come up with suitable replacements that might “keep the emotional motivation”, one has to wonder where that leaves those whose motivation might be – oh, I don’t know – celebrating the birth of Christ?

It was way back in 2006 that Luton council decided to ban Christmas trees and replace traditional city celebrations with “Harry Potter-themed” events. Others followed suit, banning all mentions of Christ from religious Christmas cards. Shortly afterwards one hospital in Scotland refused to distribute a Christmas CD because it mentioned Jesus.

Year after year, the “Christmas controversy” recurred, with the company handling most cinema advertising in the UK banning a Church of England promotion using the Lord’s Prayer in 2015 – a prayer that, for 2,000 years, had informed our whole culture. Although to call it a controversy would imply a robust fightback that never occurred.

Then the pandemic hit, severing a few more Christian traditions that were still there, hanging by a thread. Communal worship was only allowed in certain “tiers” of society, with many forced to attend Christmas masses in that least celestial of places, online, and any schools still brave enough to push ahead with nativity plays forced to battle against the dual wrath of Covid and the PC brigade. If only there were a vaccine for the latter. Little wonder the unions are already urging schools to scrap the staging of both nativity plays and “festive shows” now.

Yet while the crucial traditions underpinning Christmas are whittled down to nothing, what do we choose to focus on? The frivolities, the accessories, the garnish. Before we’ve even hit December, that side of Christmas is being pumped-up out of all proportion – maybe in an unconscious attempt to give a day that is being emptied of significance greater weight.

On the high street, the toys are larger and louder, more garish and expensive than ever before: the Lego sets no-one will ever get around to making “5,000 pieces strong!”, the “festive personalised” Toblerones XXL (because what could show someone you care better than 4.5 kilos of chocolate?). But when I tried to find my daughter a traditional advent calendar? Well, that proved near impossible.

Over the celebration of consumerism that was Black Friday – the one that rolled seamlessly into Cyber Monday, and will continue for the rest of the year, until we hit the January sales – I was encouraged to snap up one of the karaoke machines we were denied last Christmas – this one boasting “9,000+ songs!” – and reserve my “epic ready-basted turkey now, at 15 per cent off!” And don’t forget that vat of cranberry sauce, tray of rosemary-roasted Jersey royals, and 20in-long cheese board. It’s enough to make one reach for the Rennies now, and especially sickening when you consider the more than 200,000 families and individuals who will find themselves homeless this Christmas.

Yet this weekend, the papers were peppered with scandalised reports of “shrinkflation” – the latest “casualties”, apparently, our mince pies (Tesco’s six-pack are “no more than a nibble”, says one customer) and Cadbury’s selection boxes. Yes, this Christmas we’re likely to get a whopping “24g less chocolate” in those than we did three years ago: “the equivalent to losing an entire Fudge bar”. Which puts the potential loss of nativity plays, midnight Mass and family gatherings into sharp relief, doesn’t it?

If it helps the panickers, I have absolute Boris Johnson-style confidence that the paraphernalia around Christmas will continue to become ever more bloated – even as the meaning behind it disappears from sight.

You can read Celia Walden’s column every Monday. Click here to read last week’s edition.