In How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a children's book that has been an American institution for 40 years, the villain is a Santa Claus in reverse. He hates Christmas - the gluttony, the damned carol singing.
He dresses up as Santa, ties a branch on his dog's head to make him look like a reindeer, and sneaks down the chimneys of his irritatingly cheery neighbours. He fills his sack with all the presents from the stockings hanging by the fire and all the presents under the Christmas tree.
Then he slinks over to all the fridges and steals all the food for the following day's feasts. And he scoots back up the chimneys, taking all the trappings of the season with him.
The Grinch gets his comeuppance in the end, of course, but watching the unfolding of the seasonal mayhem in New York, it struck me that the thrill of the story in this culture is when he's on the rampage. There's something terribly alluring, amid all the hysterical advertising and the hypnotic frenzy of spending, about this little anti-Santa.
He makes it all go away. He strips out the commercial complications and the tyrannical over-indulgence and leaves people on Christmas morning with just each other. And I'm not sure that the reason for the book's enormous and enduring popularity doesn't have something to do with a sneaking suspicion that this villain might be, after all, a kind of hero.
The Americans, in fact, have a long history of ambivalent attitudes to Christmas. On the one hand, the Puritans who founded the colonies were deeply disdainful of the festivities. A year after the Mayflower landed, the colonists' governor, William Bradford, found some people on Christmas day "in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball".
He seized their implements and sent them home. In 1659, the Puritans banned Christmas altogether, and it was still widely suppressed in New England well into the 19th century. Yet, on the other hand, Macys, the biggest department store in New York, was staying open until midnight on Christmas Eve to facilitate wild last-minute shopping sprees as far back as 1867.
Even now, the shopping impulse and the desire for a simpler, less materialistic celebration, are still at war somewhere in the American psyche. This struck me, in fact, last month, when we had our first taste of that peculiar American festival, Thanksgiving.
It's always seemed strange to me that, so soon before Christmas, these people found another excuse to stuff their faces. They do the whole thing - the turkey, the cranberries, the roast spuds, the oceans of drink - at Thanksgiving. And I always put it down to their inevitable penchant for overdoing everything. Why have one Christmas when you can have two?
But experiencing Thanksgiving and listening to people talking about it made me realise how wrong that perception was. For the attraction of Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the Pilgrim fathers or the Mayflower or any of that invented tradition (even in New England, Thanksgiving became an annual tradition in the 1780s, not the 1620s, and in the rest of America it became a holiday in 1863).
It is the anti-Christmas. It is as if the Grinch had stolen everything but the food, the drink, the warmth and the family feeling.
And if you listen to people talking about it this is, in so many words, what they say. They say how nice it is to have a family celebration, a ritual meal, without all the stress and the fuss of buying presents. The essence of Thanksgiving is a delightful absence - no gifts, no shopping, no mad rush to raid the stores for expensive and often useless presents, no stressed-out scrutiny of the kids' faces trying to read their expressions for unqualified joy or concealed disappointment.
Of course, the Americans, having stumbled on this instructive ritual, then eat the insane root of forgetfulness and wash the lesson away in a flood of Christmas shopping. We're hardly ones to talk and no doubt we will soon catch up on the excesses from the American way of Christmas we have yet to master. But there is still something breathtaking about the spectacle of Christmas shopping in New York.
Americans, to make a ridiculous generalisation, are terrified of their own children. They will do almost anything to avoid the prospect of having their kids scream at them. So grown-up, confident, wealthy New Yorkers, many probably used to exercising authority and commanding respect in the workplace, queue for ages outside the big toy store on Fifth Avenue, F.A.O. Schwartz.
They stand in the cold and the sleet for the privilege of being allowed into the overcrowded shop to spend as much money as they can manage on things their children have demanded but probably don't really want.
And the latest thing is even worse than this. The largest of the toy chains, Toys 'R' Us, has instituted a system whereby children can take almost complete control of the present-buying mania. Santa is factored out of the equation. The kid gives the store a list of presents he or she wishes to receive.
On the same principle as that which applies to wedding presents, the grandparents, aunts, uncles and whoever else are obliged to shower Junior with affection, calls in to the shop, selects a present from the computerised list, and signs the credit card bill. The tedium of thinking about, choosing and presenting a gift is removed.
It is all perfectly logical and perfectly insane. And it expresses precisely the ambivalence of American attitudes to Christmas, the combination of hatred for and abject surrender to its unrestrained consumerism.
So, too, does another New York yuletide ritual - the musical of Dickens's A Christmas Carol which is now an annual event in Madison Square Garden. You pay a lot of money, up to $50, for your ticket.
You enter a lobby packed with stalls and vendors, pushing everything from eggnog to plastic top-hats filled with popcorn. You are funnelled through a passageway where more vendors are strategically placed to sell you programmes, posters, T-shirts. You sit down and watch a morality play that tells you the greedy will burn in hell and that the spirit of Christmas is the antithesis of the obsessive pursuit of money.
And when you have dried your eyes after the emotion of Mr Scrooge's renunciation of wealth and embrace of the poor, you make your way back out into a city in which the average income of poor families is one-twentieth the average income of rich families. As for the Grinch, that bringer of the simple, present-free Christmas, in the book that is read to the children, he learns a valuable lesson: "Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more."
And the great thing is that if, moved by this moral, the kids want to see more of this convert to the joys of resisting consumerism, they can. There's a huge inflatable Grinch hanging up in 34th Street, right above the ever-open door of Macys.