Perhaps not so holy but sacred

If you have kept the Sunday Times Culture section for the Christmas TV listings, have a look at the reproduction of Orazio Gentileschi's beautiful painting of the Holy Family, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, on pages six and seven. A grey wintry sky lurks with intent in the background.

The disconnected head of a donkey looms eerily over the broken wall behind which Joseph, Mary and the baby have sought shelter from the impending storm.

Mary lies on the ground, tilting her naked breast forward so the child can feed. Though she is elegant and solemn, Gentileschi suggests, beneath the grey folds of her dress, the strain placed on her curved back by the awkward position. And Joseph's head is lolling backwards towards us, his shoulders slumped over the big bundle that holds the family's meagre possessions. His body is limp and lifeless, his eyes shut tight. He is wrecked, frazzled, at the end of his tether. Except for the baby on the breast, everything about the picture speaks of tension, foreboding and nervous exhaustion.

Why does this Holy Family seem so much more human and recognisable now than the statuesque Nativity scenes that represent them in more conventional paintings and in cribs? It's not just that the mixture of stress and fatigue probably comes closer to our family Christmases than the calm procession of shepherds and Magi arriving with gifts. It's also that the arrangement of the family tells us that this is no perfect image of respectable domesticity.

The bond between the breast-feeding mother and the well-fed baby excludes the worn-out Joseph, reminding us that he is not in fact the baby's father. The Holy Family is not only a bunch of refugees, it's not actually a conventional nuclear family at all. This weary middle-aged man has taken on a girl pregnant with someone else's child and worn himself out trying to protect them.

Yet they are, of course, a real family, all the more so perhaps for their displaced state and failure to meet the traditional criteria for respectability. And maybe they're a better icon for the Irish Christmas of 2003 than the familiar, perhaps over-familiar family in the crib.

Christmas has become, more than anything, a festival of the family, and perhaps one of the reasons why it has lost much of its religious gloss is that the family no longer matches its conventional religious image. Most of us, for one reason or another, feel a lot more like we're on the Flight to Egypt than in a Nativity scene with angels, shepherds and wise men.

It's true of course, that most of us still live as part of a nuclear family - a married couple with kids. But it's not in fact the old nuclear family - both parents now tend to work outside the home, making the old gender division of labour a lot more problematic. Twelve per cent of two-parent married families, moreover, have children who are older than the marriage - suggesting that their family existed before it became official.

About a third of Irish families are not made up of a married couple with their own kids. Single parenthood, separation, divorce and co-habitation, as well as the old reality of widowhood, have complicated things.

It's easy to feel, if you liked things the way they used to be, that the Irish family is on the skids and that Christmas is a mockery of its former self.

In fact, things are rather less gloomy than that. One of the most interesting and heartening pieces of research published in Ireland this year was Family Well-Being: What Makes a Difference?, a study by Kieran McKeown consultants for the Ceifin Centre in Shannon.

Combining a survey of 1,500 households with children and an in-depth study of 250 families of different types, it set out to discover what makes a happy family. While it came up with much fascinating explanation for family contentment - principally the quality of the relationships between its members - what was most significant was what it didn't find.

It didn't find any real relationship between family type and family happiness: "The type of family in which one lives - such as a one- or two-parent household and whether the parents are married, cohabiting, single or separated - has virtually no impact on family well-being."

What matters, in other words, is not form but content, not whether the family meets some idealised definition but how the parents behave towards each other and towards their children.

The conservative view that everyone would be happier if only we went back to the classic nuclear family is simply wrong.

The family is complicated now, of course, but wasn't it always? Weren't there always, at the Christmas dinner table, mad old aunts who, after a few more sherries, would hint at a dark and scandalous past? Or the confirmed bachelor brother who had to get away early because he had to see a friend? Or the young daughter who married an older man out of the blue and had a suspiciously premature baby? Or the middle- aged man, nodding off in front of the telly like Gentileschi's Joseph, half-wondering what he let himself in for when he married that pregnant young one?

The family, perhaps, has never been holy, but that's never stopped it from being kind of sacred.