"One of the main things that Christmas means to me is that God actually likes the company of human beings. God starts living a human life in the middle of the world when the life of Jesus begins, and that suggests that, as the Bible says, God actually loves the world - he likes to be with us, he likes us to be with him.

And what flows from that for Christians, is the sense that human beings are just colossally worthwhile. God thought they were worth spending a lifetime with, and all that spills over into how we see all kinds of human beings; the ones we don't like or the ones we don't reckon very much, the ones we don't take very seriously. But they are all to be taken very seriously, they are all to be loved.

And so Christmas, as I see it, is the very beginning of that sense of huge human dignity in all the people around us - and that's what I think we are celebrating. That is the most important thing. I hope everyone listening has a very happy Christmas."