HAPPY Banana Day everyone! Can you believe a whole year has passed since we last celebrated this auspicious day? It only seems like yesterday that we were decking the halls with bows of bananas and crow-barring granddad into his gorilla suit for the annual Banana Day present swapping bonanza.

I only hope you have managed to get a turkey big enough for your whole clan this year and that everyone will be thrilled with the gifts you have chosen - we really don't want any slip ups on Banana Day, now do we?

Wait a minute, what's that you say, you don't celebrate Banana Day? But it's the 368th anniversary of bananas going on sale in this country for the first time - what better opportunity do you need for buying truck loads of food and spending the equivalent of the national debt on overpriced, unwanted gifts?

Have you no pride? Or are you just saving yourself for Happy Chappie Day (the 112th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's birth) next week and Happy Choppie Day (the 219th anniversary of the unveiling of the first guillotine in Paris) the week after.

There must be some reason why you are not jumping on the conveyor belt of consumerism that takes us from Christmas to Valentine's Day to Mother's Day to Easter and on and on throughout the year back to Christmas again. Perhaps you have run out of money, if that is actually possible in these days of seemingly unlimited credit, or maybe - and this is a pretty unlikely scenario - you have, like me, simply decided that enough is enough.

The crunch came for me, not as you might imagine as I snaffled down an early Easter egg, but when in the matter of a couple of hours I was told by various leading supermarkets to get my Easter turkey/ chocolates/booze now to avoid the last minute rush; I received my first Easter card; I was asked what the Munchkin was getting for Easter; and I was offered a slice of Easter Swiss Roll.

After brushing the crumbs from my lips - hey, I might be an agnostic but I'm a chocoholic agnostic - I was forced to ask what made it an Easter Swiss Roll as opposed to the common or garden variety. Was Swiss Roll on the menu at the Last Supper perhaps?

"Er, no," said the lady who had generously offered me a slice, "I think it's because the vanilla cream is yellow rather than white."

Well, that cleared that up, but it didn't answer a more fundamental question rattling round my brain. Why do we feel the need to buy cards, gifts, turkeys and Swiss Roll at all - since when has Easter been about buying "stuff"?

There has been an element of consumerism attached to Easter for a long time. When I was a child - back when Swiss Roll was considered something of a foreign delicacy - it was already a competition to get more chocolate eggs than your mates and to see just how many you could cram down your neck while watching Jesus Of Nazareth ("Ooh, hasn't Jesus got lovely blue eyes").

But at least there was still some mention of Jesus back then, even if it was just Robert Powell in a skimpy loin cloth. Now he doesn't seem to get a look in (that's Jesus, not Robert) because we are all too busy buying, giving and taking back "stuff".

If you think this all sounds ridiculously holier-than-thou coming from an agnostic, you're probably right but you're also missing the point. The truth of it is that I don't care whether people pray or pay their way through Easter, but I do feel distinctly uncomfortable about the way we now dress up our consumerism in religious garb.

I can't quite figure out what the connection is between buying your kid a Gameboy and the crucifixion and resurrection of the son of God. But maybe it's me who is missing the point; maybe it is only us agnostics and atheists who don't understand the religious significance of a Swiss Roll.