NO Christmas season would be complete without making a trip up the motorway to see that perennial favourite The Nutcracker.

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s yearly indulgence at the Hippodrome always attracts a fair-sized Worcester crowd, one of whom I met quite by chance in the bar before the curtain went up.

I have no difficulty whatsoever in waxing lyrical about Sir Peter Wright’s sumptuous production. Nevertheless, it was my new companion who succinctly summed up the show’s timeless qualities in – pardon the pun – a nutshell.

“The thing is you see,” said the stranger, “this is all about harking back to long-gone Christmases, when there was no such thing as consumerism, just simple presents arranged around the tree.

And those were the days when every child had a mother and father who actually lived under the same roof.” His observations were still lingering in my thoughts hours later as we crossed Hurst Street and retraced our steps to the car park.

I reckon that Christmas is more of a pagan festival than anything else. Even today, its significance as a form of primitive light worship is no better demonstrated than by the more garish examples of suburban homes transformed into the Blackpool illuminations that grace the pages of your Worcester News at this time of year.

And let’s face it, what’s all that eating and drinking about, if it’s not a throwback to the time when we huddled in caves during the solstice days of pre-history?

Nevertheless, people of my generation probably regard the post-war Christmas as being the personification of traditional festivities. This was the midnight mass of Yuletide past before the rampant materialism of the modern age set in.

I count myself extremely lucky to have been brought up in a small community in the 1950s that still had a sense of scale and proportion.

In other words, it was a time of balance, where excess was tempered by other factors. Nowadays, we live in an age of extremes of which Christmas is only one example.

And that’s why I head northwards every year to see The Nutcracker… always a magical, mystical reminder of the ghosts of Christmases past.