Paul Vallely: And a merry Eid/Chanukah/Christmas to you

Jewish friends tell me that they now get cards from other Jews with pictures of the Baby Jesus on the front

A friend has one of those seasonal lights in his front window. You know the kind of thing, it's a kind of inverted "V" shape, with light bulbs pretending to be candles. "I know we're not Jewish," he said, " but we like it."

I reached into my toddler's nursery bag and pulled out the painting that my son had adorned with bits of sticky. "It's not Jewish," I said, "You're mixing it up with this." I showed him the picture of a menorah that Thomas had done that day. "Actually what you've got is something that you see in German homes during Advent."

"Never mind," said my friend, cavalierly, "but then a little bit of confusion never harmed anyone."

There's a lot of it about. It's not just my son's predominantly non-Jewish nursery celebrating Chanukah. Jewish friends tell me that nowadays they get Christmas cards from other Jews with pictures of Baby Jesus on the front. And Mohammed, the son of a Muslim friend, is playing Joseph in the nativity play in his school where 98 per cent of the pupils are adherents of Islam. Christmas, it seems, is becoming a synthesised portmanteau festival in which everyone pitches in.

Pofaced Christians tend to get sniffy about this. Certainly it's true that lots of people nowadays seem spectacularly ignorant of what the nativity story actually says. Another friend dines out at this time of year on an incident he witnessed at the Lakeside shopping centre in Thurrock. Essex. A family – father, small boy and granny – had stopped beside the crib, evidently waiting for the child's mother. The child was throwing money into the manger as if it were a wishing-well. "Don't throw money," granny said, crossly, "give him a crisp." The boy started to toss crisps into the crib. Bored with that, he turned to his father. "Dad, what's the baby for?" he asked. "I dunno," the parent answered. "Ask your mother when she comes."

Nowadays even Mr Charles Moore's Daily Telegraph seems under-informed on the details of the Nativity. "Bishop says Jesus was an asylum-seeker," thundered its front page this week, evidently unaware that the Bible was the first with the news on this one. The evangelist Matthew's account of how Herod killed all the male children under the age of two, prompting Mary and Joseph to flee with Jesus to Egypt, is a classic refugee tale, though the family probably didn't register with the UN and so may not have had the paperwork to prove it.

But there are lots of people who think this new low-zeal syncretism is a good thing. After all, said a friend from a Jewish family, "Christmas is an inescapable event on the landscape – even Jews locate events as 'before Christmas' or after it . So why not do the tree and the presents, and if you've already had Chanukah gifts, you just get double". Others take a more secular but equally laid-back approach. "The Christ child is really just a symbol of sentimental goodwill like Santa," said a non-religious Jew, "and if I can send out a card of the Madonna and Child from the National Gallery at least I'm doing my bit to keep medieval and renaissance iconography alive in contemporary culture."

It could be worse, as is evidenced by the characterless "Happy Holidays" greeting that people exchanged as they left the office on 24 December when I lived in New York. Or, currently, all those allegedly humorous Santa cards, with their references to bestiality with reindeer – ho, ho, ho.

Less pofaced Christians have found a new theology in all this. Maybe diversity isn't humanity fouling up some divine concord; maybe it is what God intended, so Ian Markham wrote in 1994 in a ground-breaking book called Plurality and Christian Ethics (if he will pardon my précis). And the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said something similar in his Dignity of Difference this year – though much good it did him among his more hardline co-religionists who branded it heresy.

Still it's nice to know things are different out here in the real world. As Mohammed practices for his role as Joseph, with the traditional tea-towel on his head, his father is busy scribbling away at a stack of Christmas cards. "They are," he says, "to reciprocate to Christians who sent them to me – or who sent me Eid cards. Interestingly most of our Eid cards were from non-Muslims this year." He is not bothered what the cards depict. "I just buy the cheapest. Some have Santas and some have a picture of the Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, on them. I don't mind. The message is the same. It says I respect your culture, and am pleased you respect mine."

Mind you, he's not sure about a Christmas tree. That's too much like bringing "the other" into his home. Not that my Jewish friends are bothered. They either say that the tree is a pagan symbol or, tongue in cheek, call it a Chanukah bush. In any case, Mohammed is working on that one.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk