The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl. Photograph: Brian Rasic/Rex Features

When Colombian drugs lords invented Father Christmas as a marketing tool for cocaine, back in the 1980s, they could never have imagined that this red-faced, overweight man, whipping his staff while shooting through flurries of “snow”, would one day become beloved by infants worldwide. And when, 4,000 winter solstices ago, the Beaker Folk cast toy clay pots to symbolise the passing year’s disappointments, and tossed them into the past from a tiny spring-loaded mammoth, they could not have dreamed that, many millenniums later, we would enact their yearly rite as the Christmas game Buckaroo.

Today, even religious folk accept that the date of Christ’s birth was fudged to appropriate pagan celebrations, but all of us were shocked when the BBC slowed the Earth’s passage around the sun this year so that New Year’s Day coincided with the already scheduled debut of the new sexed-up Sherlock. (One of the few female characters in the original Holmes stories, Irene Adler, was changed from an opera singer to a prostitute. Out Mrs Hudson as an angel and the whole gamut of TV roles for women will be covered.)

Not all traditions survive. For a whole generation of British people, nothing says Christmas like the newsreader Angela Rippon emerging on ludicrously long legs from a news desk on another Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. (Who even imagined Angela Rippon had legs? It was commonly assumed that she was some kind of news Davros, wheeled into position to warn of power cuts, three-day weeks and punk rock.) But today Morecambe and Wise’s 1970s comedy double act show is almost as forgotten as Horne and Corden’s, which was broadcast way back in 2009.

There are other traditional casualties. In Scotland, on New Year’s Eve, a tall young man would enter the house at midnight, carrying a piece of coal. Today, rising fuel prices mean coal is delivered piece by piece in Securicor vans, so instead a little old man enters the house in the afternoon, holding a winter fuel allowance voucher and turns on the gas fire, so that it will be nice and warm at midnight, when heroin addicts break in to steal copper piping. (Similarly, the Easter tradition of the Maundy money, when the Queen gives silver coins to the poor, continues, but alongside the Maundy melting, when the poor then post the coins off to dodgy “cash for jewellery” websites in exchange for credit at Voucherland.)

But how quickly do apparently isolated events coalesce into traditions? In the first week of last year, the papers ran photographs of Helena Bonham Carter, then not a CBE, and her husband, the goth film man Timothy Buttons, carousing on the Chiltern Hills with the Camerons on New Year’s Day. (Nick Clegg had been left behind to fulfil his traditional role of posing alone on the lawn of Chequers, naked except for a mask of the two-faced god Janus, looking backwards into the past and forwards into the future and imagining fondly that he has any significance in either.)

This strange Bonhameron tableau was only 12 months back. And yet this year revellers had already gathered in Wapping early on 2 January to await the pictures of our prime minister’s 2012 new year guests, so as to predict which borderline liberal arts figure Cameron will award with the poisoned chalice of the CBE next year, their reward for dining with him an eternal loss of credibility. (Look out for the now thoroughly co-opted Timothy Buttons’s forthcoming film of George Osborne’s 2012 budget announcement, George Pencilhands. The batcave-haired director’s love of S&M-styled fantasy is sure to prove the perfect vehicle for the previously low-profiled chancellor.)

My generation has lived through the emergence of a tradition. Nearly three decades ago the Pogues’ banjo player Jem Finer came up with a lyric about a sailor returning home. His partner, the performance artist Marcia Farquhar, hated it and suggested a story based on the couple over the road, whose Christmases always followed the same cycle of angry recrimination and drunken redemption. Vocalist Shane MacGowan eventually relocated the story to New York, city of emigrants’ dreams, giving the lyrics’ mix of black despair and romantic resilience a global resonance.

A quarter-century since its completion, the now seasonal standard “Fairytale of New York” recently endured a curious mixture of homage and parody on another seasonal standard, Michael McIntyre’s Christmas Comedy Roadshow. The host and his writers entertained the notion that the song’s lyrics were unintelligible. The crowd was encouraged to karaoke them as best they could over the top of MacGowan’s vocal, in which he is in character as an incoherent, incarcerated drunk.

The tragic opening image of an old dying man singing an Irish folk song was guffawed through and an inappropriate celebrity cutaway showed Carol Vorderman singing the supposedly incomprehensible lyrics word perfect, suggesting the editor had some secret wish to undermine the piece. Already I was slack-jawed, thinking: “What are they going to do with Kirsty MacColl’s vocal?” MacColl, part of the genetic fabric of folk, and an essential element of the song’s appeal, died in a boating accident 11 years ago and it might seem rather tasteless to encourage a mass slur through her contribution. Instead, the backing track snapped into an instrumental, a young singer in hot pants came on, a troupe of stunned Irish dancers hoofed along and a cutaway to a happy Irish Eamonn Holmes reassured everyone this wasn’t offensive.

On some level, the sequence was sincerely meant and 34 years since the last edition of The Black and White Minstrel Christmas Show, it’s good to see racially stereotyped dancing back where it belongs, at the centre of the seasonal schedules. But the song survives.

As well as playing in the Pogues, Jem Finer is a conceptual artist. Much of his work seems concerned with music and notions of endurance. Water began dripping sonorously into the woodland pit of his Score for a Hole in the Ground six years ago and Longplayer is currently 12 years into its 1,000-year cycle of musical drones in an east London lighthouse. But Finer’s pieces’ attempts at immortality remain necessarily speculative. In pop terms, “Fairytale of New York” is already eternal, a secular carol with a spiritual resonance, an impregnable slice of dirty realist redemption that’s now beyond both parody and its creators’ control. Strangely, it’s something to believe in. Take my baubles, take my pies, take my Christmas carols, and my Christmas Doctor Who, but I’ll only give you my 7in of “Fairytale of New York” when you prise it from my cold dead hands.