LONDON -- "What are we coming to" cried one of the grannies at my Christmas dinner, meaning we, the English. Her small anguish was prompted by the thought of the bank holidays and festive refusal of work that wraps everyone in a haze of food and alcohol, gifts and family, and lets the outer world fend for itself for the week.

To her, the collective time off means a collective abandonment of seriousness and responsibility. She does not really have a Scrooge-like character ("Bah, Christmas"). Instead, she has an old person's deep nostalgia for a time when being English gave her the comfort of superiority, of her place in a hierarchy of nations. Hers is a very Protestant England, in which the virtues of sobriety, hard work and public spirit explained the world leadership of the British Empire, and should have been sufficient to perpetuate that leadership. She cannot find her place in today's free market.

What she had not noticed was that throughout Christmas many shops in Britain have been trading as usual. These are all run by non-Christians -- not the sort of non-Christians gathered round our Christmas table, nonbelievers in any religion, but happy to observe the rites of tradition -- but believers in other religions. Commercial life in Britain is sustained throughout the year by Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs using the entrepreneurial energy that characterizes immigrants. It is they who sustain Granny's English way of life.