April Jones and Afghanistan show us why we must put petty family squabbles aside for Christmas

Our Foxy delivers her Christmas message

Not everyone likes Christmas, you know.

And I don't just mean the Grinches who moan about the telly repeats, argue about sprouts and refuse to wear a paper hat from the cracker on the grounds it's childish.

There is a seed of darkness in this pagan ritual of gathering together to stuff our faces, despite the fact it was long ago acquired by a new religion and has since had lots of other things hung on it, like an overloaded fir tree.

Christmas is now about not just the booze and food, and marking the turning point of winter - it's now presents, children, spending, board games, forced jollity and jumpers with an uncertain sense of irony.

Up and down the land, people will be doing their utmost to turn their homes into a cross between the Bisto advert and a 1930s Coca-Cola commercial. And if any of them achieve that, it will be by ignoring the harsh realities of life.

There are people who do not know how they will get through the next week or two.

The parents of April Jones, the five-year-old girl who went missing on October 1 while playing outside her home in Machynlleth, Powys, are going to be spending it without her.

Wales News Service
Last Christmas: April Jones' family have to face Christmas without their little girl

Worse, they will be spending it still not knowing for sure if she is alive or dead, or where her body might be. They may never know.

There are thousands of others families with a similar, achingly painful void at their heart. Those who have lost loved ones through illness or disease, the ones whose children ran away from home, the people still trying to understand why someone took their own life.

It doesn't matter if it's high-profile people like Whitney Houston who died of a drugs overdose in February, film director Tony Scott who threw himself off a bridge in August, or someone down the road whose granny passed away. There will be empty seats at the dinner table, tear-filled toasts to absent friends, and not as much joy as Bisto might expect.

But then these things happen, don't they? People die, they cannot stay forever, and whether it's five or 105 we all have our time. The world keeps turning, and if you need any proof of that it's in the fact war reporter Marie Colvin was killed telling the awful truth of the Syrian conflict 10 months ago and the Syrians are still conflicting while the world looks on and does little to stop it.

Gone but not forgotten: Marie Colvin

There are other families having a difficult Christmas through no choice of their own. There are 9,000 British soldiers fighting and training others to fight in pretty much the unfriendliest place on Earth, which means 9,000 families back home trying not to think about it.

Imagine for a moment your old school class lined up on the playground for fire drill - about 30 people. Then imagine 300 classes lined up like that, imagine them in Afghanistan with the Taliban burying bombs under the road and paying policemen to shoot a few in their barracks, and remember whatever you think of soldiers and war they were all children once. Now they're bigger, and they have guns, but they're still a long way from their mums.

(And they've had to put up with David Cameron visiting them to play ping pong. Poor sods.)

There are policemen who don't tell lies who will spend the Christmas season dealing with drunks, drug addicts, and the mentally ill. The same goes for doctors, nurses, and don't forget the rarely-mentioned A&E receptionists and ambulance technicians who are first in the front line.

There will be on-call social workers, fire crews who'll probably be pumping water out of flooded homes, security guards, unpaid carers, and benighted journalists sat in the office drinking flat Asti Spumanti out of a plastic cup from the water machine.

There are those whose houses have been made uninhabitable in the past week, with sewage halfway up the living room wall. There are people like BBC reporter Robert Peston, who have been burgled a week before Christmas and now have to come to terms, as he does, with the loss of emotionally priceless trinkets.

There are people in hospital. There are people who've just had a grim diagnosis. There are people caught up in legal disputes they can't settle who will spend the next two weeks worrying about the lawyers' bill. There are people whose marriages will implode in the next few days.

And then there are those, worst of all, whose Christmas will be painful because someone, somewhere, has chosen to make it so.

Even some of those happy, advertising-compliant family dinners will have a shadow at the table - a relative or friend who is not there because of an argument. I know of two families in which sons and grandchildren will not see their parents and grandparents because a daughter-in-law has inexplicably banned it.

Not suggested a visit on Boxing Day; not had a little row which can be resolved; just turned, for reasons no-one can fathom, against the paternal grandparents and decided to hurt them as much as possible.

I know of a third in which a daughter hasn't spoken to her parents for years and returns presents unopened, and none of these families are bad, damaged, or anything but fairly ordinary. Even Rose West gets a call from her kids at Christmas, but these three sets of grandparents will get nothing.

Not even an explanation.

Age UK reported this week that three million older people are dreading Christmas. They will spend it alone, they will be cold, 8,000 more of them will die for every degree the temperature drops, half of them say TV is their main form of company and the festive telly, as we all know, is rubbish.

According to the latest census a quarter of this country now says it has no religious faith, so it should not matter quite so much that all these things are just as true at Christmas as they are at other times of the year. It's just a date, these things happen, there's not a lot you can do.

Well there's not a lot we can do about life's tragic misfortunes, or the wars in Afghanistan and Syria. Someone has to be on duty to wipe up the sick, and there will always be those who would frankly prefer a Fray Bentos pie on their own to having to wear one of those stupid, itchy hats.

But if there is something you can do, why not do it? If you hate your in-laws, bite your lip or at least let the rest of the family go and visit them for a day. If there's been a row, swallow your pride and pick up the phone. Ask that neighbour, or the lonely bloke at work, to pop in for mince pies.

Don't let the shadow just sit there, growing longer and darker. There is enough darkness in the world already, so making more of the stuff is a bit unnecessary. We're about to run out of horribleness.

Christmas does not have to mean religion, or Saturnalia, or anything at all if you don't want it to. But if it should mean one thing to everybody - of whatever faith or lack thereof, of every colour and family construction from gay dads to thrice-remarried grandparents, it should be that for a few days a year we all remember.

Just that. Just remember all the people who could be there, or should be, and then if you can just do something about it.

What would it cost you? A crappy cracker and you'd get slightly fewer sprouts.

Don't tell me that's not worth a phone call.

Have a warm and well-fed Christmas, everyone - and be as happy as you can be.

Solent These playful red fox cubs reared up to each other in a bid to create a social pecking order within their den

Read more of what fleetstreetfox has to say:

* On Jim Davidson's comeuppance

* On why Andrew Mitchell is still a very silly man

* On the Queen taking her country back

* On the cowboys behind America's gun massacres

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