I had better just come out and say it: I’m not a great fan of Christmas. Perhaps I should clarify this: I’m not a great fan of "Christmas", i.e. that festival of seasonal bonhomie that concludes on 25 December rather than the celebration of Christ’s birth that begins on 25 December.

It’s not the commercialism I hate. After all, shopkeepers need the business. What I hate is the superficial party atmosphere.

Some years ago, at about this time of year, I took a heartbreaking funeral for a father of three young children. Quite out of the blue, he had dropped dead while he was driving to work one morning. I remember going to visit his wife and kids the week before Christmas. All the decorations had been taken down. The glitter and the baubles were an insult to their pain.

Then, when they went for a walk to clear their heads, the streets were full of pissed-up Brummies in Santa hats, all snogging and dribbling. This is a time of year when the bereaved particularly feel crushingly alienated from the world around them.

My Christmas-phobia really began when I had to go from seeing this family to another Christmas party. "Cheer up, Vicar, it’s Christmas. Have a mince pie."

Well, no, I don’t want to cheer up, and I hate mince pies. All I could think of was how it’s the people who walk in darkness who are promised the great light. Those who dwell in the land of the shadow of death: upon them that the light will shine.

I’m not sure I’d notice the light of the coming Messiah amid pulsating disco lights and another strain of Wizzard’s dreadful "Oh, I wish it could be Christmas every day."

Last night at the carol service, an elderly lady in the second row had a heart attack in the middle of the sermon. The congregation sat in silence for 15 minutes, as doctors worked on her and the ambulance arrived.

As she left for hospital, we all stood for the familiar reading from John’s Gospel. Suddenly, it took on a much greater depth of meaning. We all knew the words: the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. But, this time, we had a completely unexpected context from which to understand them. You could have heard a pin drop.

"I hope she’s going to be OK, and I’m sorry the service was ruined," was the most common response of people leaving church. I’m not so sure it was ruined.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford.