I am obsessive about music, especially anything that falls outside whatever defines a mainstream pop song. I courted my wife to the sounds of Sonic Youth, bonded with my 12-year-old son at Glastonbury over a set by !!! (pronounced Chk Chk Chk), and rocked my daughter to sleep over Helter Skelter, played extremely loud. So it is with embarrassment that I confess I am hopelessly felled by a good hymn.

I declared myself an atheist at eight. A Sunday-school preacher used to do magic tricks and link them to parables. “The blue hanky turning red is like Christ on the cross,” he would say, before launching into a Bible story. One trick of his was to fill a chalice with coins at the tap of a wand. I asked him if anyone could do that trick. “All you need is faith,” he said. “What about a wand?” “You don’t need a wand if you have faith.” That afternoon, I spent an hour in the cellar with a stick, trying to fill a tin with money. I emerged an atheist.

I might have no religious faith, but I have a family full of preachers, so I feel comfortable with churches. I like the smell of them, I like the social calendar that ritual brings, and I love group singing. So it was that my family went to the Christingle service on Christmas Eve four years ago, at a church where I used to be an altar boy.

Outside, it was dark and crisply cold, and a wonderful yellow lamplight shone by the doors. Inside, children were overexcited and adults tried to shush them. Our pew was packed with kids, parents and aunts wrapped up in their best overcoats, and, although my father was ill and needed a wheelchair, he insisted on standing to sing.

Silent Night was first. I love the way its melancholy sound swoops gently, searching for “heavenly peace”. Next was We Three Kings, followed by Ding Dong Merrily on High, both of which are the nearest thing to a football chant in the service. Then it was time for the children to stand around the edge of the church, holding candles embedded in fruit decorated with cocktail sticks and raisins. The lights were turned off and the flames flickered as they began to sing Away in a Manger. I started to join in, but stopped, unable to sing a note without being wracked by heaving sobs.

Perhaps it was the children’s voices or the atmosphere of Christmas Eve that got me – I am an emotional incontinent, prone to leak at the slightest provocation. Perhaps it was because Away in a Manger was made to be sung by the innocent, faces lit with candles. Perhaps it was because another year had passed and, as the ritual remains the same, we note the changes in each other; perhaps family rituals are now filled with a rushing sense of mortality. Perhaps, surrounded by my family in the darkness of the church, I felt what Salman Rushdie described as the hole in my stomach where my faith used to be. Perhaps I wished that preacher had never shown me the magic trick. Whatever the answer, I have not been able to sing the song since.

The comedian and television presenter Mark Thomas’s DVD Serious Organised Criminal is out now; he is at the Venue, Leicester Square, WC2, until December 15

To hear versions by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Nat King Cole, go to timesonline.co.uk/music

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