JANUARY 10 — In our busy lives, which inevitably become swallowed up by our narrow and all-consuming day-to-day concerns, it is easy to take for granted the cultural oddities of our own societies and assume that everyone else shares them.

From my British/American/western European perspective, therefore, it is somewhat disconcerting to learn that our concept of “Christmas” isn’t the only one.

In my part of the world, Christmas comes loaded with baggage — a series of well-established and seemingly unquestionable motifs and traditions.

Christmas, for example, is snow (even though it never snows); Christmas is presents on the morning of the 25th, delivered mysteriously in the night by a jolly bearded fat man in a red suit; Christmas is roast turkey and spending time with family, and even for non-believers Christmas is ultimately “about” the birth of Jesus Christ.

As a child growing up, these rituals are presented and understood as immutable facts, not mere customs, and they serve to form a central part of our understanding of ourselves and how the world works.

So when you discover that many other people celebrate Christmas in an entirely different manner, it brings a sense of dislocation and alienation — just when you think you’ve got everything worked out, someone tells you that in Australia, for example, Christmas is also about days on the beach and sun-drenched barbecues… because late December is mid-summer Down Under.

And that’s only the start of it.

In Sweden nobody eats turkey at Christmas, instead gorging upon a “julbord”, a table laid out with an enormous range of dishes traditionally including ham, meatballs, ribs, salmon, herring and eel (eel? As a Christmas treat? Where I come from, eel is a punishment for being very bad).

People dressed in traditional costumes sing a Christmas carol during celebration of the Orthodox Christmas in Kiev on January 7, 2015. — AFP pic

And in many parts of France — just 100 miles or so from where I grew up, they don’t even open presents on Christmas Day, but receive their gifts the day before courtesy of Saint Nicholas.

All these things appear to be rather odd, to British eyes in any case, but at least we can be consoled by the recognition of the common theme shared by all these cultures: Christmas is based around December 25 — the day of Jesus’s birthday.

But wait a minute… it also emerges that there is also a whole swathe of Christianity for whom Christmas comes on a completely different date: namely Orthodox believers, who follow the Julian calendar (yes… there is also another calendar) and this year held their festive celebrations last Thursday, January 7.

Orthodoxy emerged a thousand years ago following the bitter split within the Christian church, and roughly split Christianity into two sectors, east and west, following a long-running dispute between the great ecclesiastical cities of Istanbul (in the east) and Rome (in the west).

Today, countries following Orthodox Christianity include Russia, the largest country in the world, along with sizeable eastern European nations such as Greece, Serbia and Ukraine, and this week all those places have been launching themselves into their prime holiday season… just when the rest of us were getting back to work and school.

Pointedly, in addition to being the Orthodox Christmas Day, this year January 7 was also notable for being the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which saw a small group of Muslim fundamentalists serve a chilling reminder that many parts of the world don’t celebrate Christmas at all by murdering Parisian writers and cartoonists in the name of Allah.

Naturally, this week’s anniversary issue of the satirical magazine attracted a great deal of attention, especially when the front cover bore a cartoon of a godlike figure under the provocative headline: “A year on: the killer is still on the loose.”

On this occasion, complaints have been led not by the Muslim world, but by the centre of (non-Orthodox) Christianity, the Vatican, which opined that the cartoon “is insulting towards faithful of all religions” and that it demonstrates how secular culture “does not wish to acknowledge or to respect believers’ faith in God, regardless of religion.”

Well, yes: for an atheist publication such as Charlie Hebdo, being insulting towards all religion is the whole point.

And the point about “respect”, so often trumpeted these days as a fundamental human right, is less straightforward than the Vatican is suggesting: if believers want atheists to show “respect” to their beliefs and allow them to be expressed, they must also be prepared to”respect” the views of non-believers and likewise allow them to be expressed.

Reconciling differing beliefs, opinions and universal demands for respect is far from simple, but perhaps one path towards greater tolerance lies in more exposure to the cultural oddities — Christmas traditions, for example — which are spread across the planet.

Having something questioned which you have always accepted as unquestioned is not pleasant. For instance, realising that there are other ways of celebrating Christmas, even a completely different date, can challenge the very identity of someone who has never known anything else.

But it can also be extremely instructive. Being made aware that, for many people, Christmas takes place on January 7 rather than December 25 can be a liberating experience, shining a light upon the fact that different worldviews do exist and are even perfectly ‘normal’.

There is room in the world for more than one Christmas… and even for no Christmas at all.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.