When it comes to the crunch, there’s nothing quite like Christmas

I returned on Saturday having spent the past six months in India: I'd dreamed of a wintry, warm-hearted festive season. I love Christmas. My Sikh family has always celebrated it, as did every Indian family I grew up with; every Briton I know in India is coming home for it. Christmas fits us like a glove: with its colour, kitsch, lights, overloaded dining tables and suffocating emphasis on family, it's the one day in the calendar when every British household looks like an Indian one.

Christmas is especially precious to my father, who grew to love it while serving in the British Army. In the morning, the sergeants woke him and the other squaddies with a mug of tea and rum; lunch was then served by the officers, including the colonel, dressed in their regimental best. My father made a point of force-feeding us a traditional roast each year - an overcooked turkey that tasted like polystyrene. Christmas appealed to my mum's religious sentiments and she'd watch every cheesy re-enactment of Jesus's birth that came on TV.

Both of them always used Christmas as a reason to spoil their children rotten. But I've only realised just how important Christmas is to Britain after seeing the way Indians celebrate festivals during my time in their country.

With Christians amounting to just 2.3 per cent of its population, India is warming to Christmas, though it is still a relatively minor festival. In the balmy evening heat of Calcutta, I watched children perform an open-air Nativity play in Bengali, with Mary dressed in a sari and Joseph sporting a turban. In Delhi, I saw rows and rows of Christmas trees on sale in the markets and shops adorned with tinsel and lamps. Indians know the importance of festivals and take any opportunity to celebrate one - however hard times are.

I've witnessed many festivals in India. Some - including Eid, Diwali, and the birthdays of the Buddha and Guru Nanak - are national holidays, while others are regional ones. Some have no official recognition but people take the day off and celebrate them anyway.

On any given day, dozens of festivals are taking place across the country. Earning a fraction of what we are paid in the West, with no welfare state to protect them, ordinary Indians face far more insecurity and hardship than anyone in Britain but will spend whatever they have to make the very most of their festivities.

Festivals provide a necessary social function, allowing people to let off steam and break through barriers. Last year, I watched Holi, the festival of colours, in Mumbai. People of every background threw dye at each other and gleefully shouted obscenities during the one day of the year when they can air any grievance they have - towards their boss, colleagues, in-laws, whoever -knowing they'd be forgotten by the evening.

This year, during Ramadan, Muslim friends in Delhi often asked me to eat with them as they broke their fast each evening, wanting me to share their experience. And I spent this Diwali at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, watching fireworks with two white British friends who were completely welcome among thousands of Sikhs.

As such, festivals are the glue that binds India's diverse and teeming multitude together, injecting the inspiration and goodwill that enables them to cope with the difficulties of their daily lives with humbling optimism and dignity.

Any Briton who is scrimping this Christmas should meet the 12-year-old I got to know in Haridwar, north of Delhi, who had left his village two years ago to work in a roadside canteen: with a grin as wide as the Ganges, he told me how much he loved partying at Diwali.

However hard the past has been and however bleak the future seems, festivals enable Indians to celebrate the present, have faith in themselves and laugh in the face of destiny.

Much is made of India's communal strife, but given the poverty and hardship of most Indians' lives, it is a miracle that these tensions are not infinitely greater. India is a uniquely tolerant country that survives and grows because rather than dwelling on their problems, Indians take every chance to celebrate life and share their celebrations.

But the role of religion is different there - and I think there's an important lesson Britons can learn from it. While most Indians are actually surprisingly relaxed about religion they don't try to deny its centrality to the festivals that unite the country. By contrast, in Britain, secularists and multiculturalists object to the religious dimension of Christmas, while ignoring its historical importance. Perennial stories about councils trying to ban it are overblown; nevertheless, there's no escaping the shift in Britain away from celebrating the Christian beliefs that are the whole reason for Christmas - a kind of embarrassment over this huge part of our culture.

In doing so, secularists miss the point. I don't believe that God defeated a thousand-headed demon at Diwali, nor that Jesus was born in a stable at Christmas, but I celebrate both because they are central to the cultures that shaped me.

Countless Indians have celebrated Diwali over time, as countless Britons have celebrated Christmas. By celebrating it myself I share in an experience that precedes me by many centuries and will long outlive me. It brings perspective, a sense of my own transience and the knowledge that bad times are as ephemeral as good and shouldn't bring me down.

That is why we all need Christmas, however hard up we may feel. It helps hold our country together, too. This year, above all, we should cherish it and celebrate it for all it's worth.