However, it is difficult to resist the real-life sequel to The Nativity Story, in which the 16-year-old actress playing Mary has become pregnant.

Keisha Castle-Hughes is due to have her baby in the spring.

To call The Nativity Story a Christmas film is of course an understatement. It is the Christmas story and even we jabbering nonChristians are glad to see someone attempt to put Christ back into Christmas. Anyone who is not sponsored by a supermarket or a softdrinks company is welcome to the slot as far as I'm concerned.

One cannot blame Christian groups for wanting to get their story out there, to go head to head with Santa and the high-street chains for once and for all. You don't have to be a Christian to believe that Christmas should be more than a marketing opportunity and a chance to shop till you drop. Surely Christmas must have been better for women when all they had to do was go to church, bang the bird in the oven and give each of the kids a tangerine.

And although I am strongly in favour of any laboursaving measure, it does seem peculiar, and a measure of female stress, that people will now pay to have their homes decorated and their Christmas shopping done by professionals.

Christmas is big bucks, of course, so it is no surprise that Hollywood, once it had witnessed the miraculous amount of money made by The Passion Of The Christ on the one hand, and pseudo-religious hokum like The Da Vinci Code on the other, should descend on the Christian market. But far-right Christian organisations' enthusiasm for the film has taken a bit of a knock with the news that the beautiful young girl portraying Mary is going to have a baby of her own.

The websites are humming with questions about whether Keisha Castle-Hughes should have been chosen for the part at all.

After all, sometimes you can have a bit too much reality. And this new film, which shows Mary in labour and she and Elizabeth (the mother of John the Baptist, remember? ) feeling their babies kicking inside them may prove a bit too real for some. It is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who made a film called Thirteen.

I know Thirteen was graphic because I found the trailers so upsetting, and would not go to see it for a fortune, although it was widely praised. There's only so much of other people's domestic agony that you can take, I find, and Hardwicke appears to have a sharp eye for suffering.

Strangely enough, the company which chose the ruthlessly realistic Hardwicke to direct The Nativity Story is called New Line, which made The Lord of the Rings films. Hardwicke's influence can be seen in the way she makes Mary and Joseph's betrothal something that is imposed on them by their parents. Mary's pregnancy causes scandal in their community. So no change there then. Mary was likely to have been a great deal younger even than Keisha Castle-Hughes, and presumably considerably more surprised when she learned of her condition.

Castle-Hughes must be the secondluckiest teenage mother in history.

Part Maori New Zealander, she is a beauty who has already starred in Whale Rider and in Star Wars: Episode III . . . Revenge of the Sith. So she won't have to go on welfare, or live in a stable. She and her 19-year-old boyfriend are said to be looking forward to their baby very much.

The Nativity Story is to open in Rome today. The Pope won't be there, because he is getting ready for his visit to Turkey, which starts on Tuesday. And Castle-Hughes won't be there either, because she's in Australia filming.