Everyone remembers where they were when Baby Jesus was born.

You still meet executives who are bitter about the fact that they were cast as a sheep, or a tree. Interestingly, the more successful the adult executive is now, the lower down the cast list he was in his Nativity play.

It would be no surprise to learn that Bill Gates's teacher cast him as a pebble or a lizard. You can bet Bill still remembers.

And everyone always remembers the name of the little girl with lovely long hair who got to play Mary, as her mother glowed, luminescent with pride, on one of the plastic chairs in the auditorium.

A follow-up survey on the girls who got to play Mary would be interesting.

Like the American teenagers who became Prom Queens, they may have peaked too soon. We may comfort ourselves with that thought this Christmas.

I've heard of the Christmas rush but I do think that special sympathy should be extended to all those people who have to attend five Nativity plays in one week. Children seem particularly resistant to the idea that their Nativity plays could be placed on some kind of rotating system of attendance, by which your parents would see one in four of your annual Nativity performances . . . kind of like the World Cup.

But the Nativity Play is not negotiable. Kids just won't wear non-attendance.

Nativity plays are a bit like war . . . you have to be there to understand at all.

It is a strange theatrical event in which the actors spend their whole time looking around the place, trying to find a parental face in the audience; although actually this sounds like most adult actors to me.

However, it really is strange to be turning up for a piece of theatre at noon.

No wonder the midday traffic jams have never been more horrendous. All those poor daddies, cursing at the traffic lights.

Traditionally the Nativity play involves a six-week rehearsal period after which the players still don't know their lines. But that's rather sweet. It's having to listen to five renditions of Away In A Manger and Silent Night that is the tough part.

Of course it serves these parents right for having all those children in the first place.

Buying a couple of people carriers is a doddle in comparison to attending five Nativity plays in seven days.

There must be such a thing as Nativity fatigue whereby some poor mother comes into the school hall, ashen-faced from her hunt for a parking space, shouts out "It's a boy!" and is beaten to death by digital cameras. But somehow those stories never get into the papers.

Shame.

And there is strong anecdotal evidence that, in the past, when Nativity plays were less fashionable, parents experienced strong Nativity fatigue with their youngest children.

They'd seen it all before, and had to be forced to attend by their older children.

And over the years a lot of tea-towels went missing as they vanished to be head-dresses for the shepherds, never to be seen again. That was the simple price of the Nativity play in those days, and many mothers grew tired of it.

My own experience of Nativity plays is limited . . . actually non-existent.

In the three convents I attended, we never once had a Nativity play that I remember, let alone participated in.

Perhaps the nuns just couldn't be bothered, and I don't blame them.

The parents didn't object, because they didn't expect a Nativity play. In fact I have a suspicion that Nativity plays were regarded as ever so slightly Protestant.

In later years, at our Christmas party, our family would put on its own Nativity play, which I'm sorry to say started in chaos and descended from there.

We used to force our youngest cousin on to a tea tray (so that he could be carried to the manger, you understand).

The youngest cousin used to object strenuously to this, shouting out "But I'm seven!" as we forced him down. I cannot identify him any more specifically as he is now a respectable member of the medical community, which has no idea about his humiliating past.