Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa holds up an idol of Baby Jesus in St Catherine’s Church after the Christmas Midnight Mass and walks in procession to the ‘Grotto’, believed to be the birth place of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, West Bank. Pic/AFP

Christmas is one of my favourite holidays. During childhood, it was the year’s highlight, for that was when Father Christmas (as we, growing up in the Midlands in the late 1960s, knew him) was sure to leave shiny awesome toys under the tree that my mother put up in our modest living room. There was no Holi or Diwali to be celebrated in England back then, at least in small towns far from London — unlike now, when Hindu festivals are celebrated in every nook and cranny with gusto and pride — and my mother, to ensure we didn’t feel left out of the excitement of other boys, made it as proper a holiday for us as possible. Also, my school then devoted part of the morning in a chapel and one of the crushing moments of my boyhood came when my friends gang pointed out that there was no Saint Pinkoo (my nickname that my parents somehow consciously registered at school as my proper name).