Christmas is supposed to be a religious festival. And yet millions of people around the world who aren’t Christian or religious celebrate it. The church sees it as a sign of our decadent times, while Nietzsche saw it as evidence that religion still has its grip on the secular world. They are both wrong. Tradition and ritual are more important to us than religion. In a world that changes with ever-increasing speed, we need the repetition of rituals and traditions to give us a sense of identity and stability. Instead of lamenting the loss of connection with religion, we should celebrate the survival of these traditions whose contemporary meaning is quite independent of any original religious connotations, writes Alexis Papazoglou.