Like step-dancing and dogging, swinging keeps alive traditions which make the countryside such an interesting place.
But it is not only farmers who make the countryside look nice and scenic as town-dwellers like it to.
Other benefits are more nebulous: native forests make the countryside prettier, says the Forestry Commission, and support a greater variety of wildlife.
The Government solution seems to be to make the countryside more suburban, to build over its green areas so that the one unquestioned value that it offers, that of space and air, is reduced.
Rural incomes rose by more than 7% a year between 1994 and 2011, according to a study by Richard Webb, a former president of the country's Central Bank.Connectivity will itself help to make the countryside more secure.
The Countryside March next weekend will not be packed with unspeakable toffs and sinister slit-eyed badger baiters; it will be a march of ordinary people who feel they are being slowly bled by an urban drive to make the countryside anaemic.
While I'm there, I'll ask myself if I could have left behind everything I knew and traveled 3,000 miles to help make the countryside a better place.
With proper targeted funding for wildlife friendly farming and effective and efficient schemes in place we can reverse these declines and make our countryside richer and healthier for birds, plants, insects and people as well as producing food".
This was perhaps in retaliation for Jeanette Winterton's Guardian article arguing the march will not be packed with "unspeakable toffs and sinister slit-eyed badger baiters" but ordinary people who feel slowly bled by an "urban drive to make the countryside anaemic".
What Christmas NiGHTS does is make that countryside snowy and transform the orbs into Christmas orbs.
