Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Christmas binds together my hybrid family

We have a newish Christmas tradition in Britain, a game to amuse and over-excite. We may call it Hunt the New Scrooge and it is bedding down nicely. Every November or thereabouts, tabloid hacks and radio shock-jocks (often those trying to resuscitate fading careers) get the country going with the first revelations about local authorities, or charities or schools which have apparently "banned" Christmas because "ethnic minorities" object to the festival.

Feverishly imaginative fabrications and colourful misrepresentations are allowed. Players can challenge with ever more loony stories. "Turkish asylum-seekers object to roast Turkey" (my own proud invention) would surely trump all. To win you must produce the most outlandish example and shout loudly "It's PC gone mad!"

Here are some entries from this year's fervid competition. A council in Suffolk is accused of withdrawing funds for customary Christmas street lights because they don't fit in with its "core values of equality and diversity". Lambeth, always a productive area for the hunt, allegedly wanted to rename the lights "winter" or "celebratory" and were persecuted by the press until they surrendered to the pre-eminence of Christmas.

Next, in Lowestoft, where there are probably more golliwogs in attics than black people in the streets, the Tory-controlled council announced the lights had to be less "Christian", or so we were told by the charge of the light brigade. And a chorus rang out to condemn political correctness and its festivals police.

These officers were nowhere to be seen when I walked down Regent Street this last Saturday of binge shopping before Christmas. There they are, big and dazzling garlands festooning the centre sweep into Piccadilly Circus, the throbbing heart of irrepressible London: lights that I used to bring my kids to see for many years, lights which lifted my own heart too in those early days as an impoverished immigrant from sunny climes who found winter's dark and cold unbearable. The trumpeting seraphs looking up to the heavens were best, then the bells with enormous bows. Having come from a country where electricity was carefully budgeted, such extravagant displays over so many days left us awestruck. All gone today, those easy, cosy images in red, green and gold.

Like Christmas itself, each year the Regent Street lights get ever more tacky and tarty, mammon's inamoratas, available and open to anyone offering the biggest pile. Today, beaming over our heads, are Manny the Mammoth, Sid the Sloth and Diego the Sabertooth, characters in a forthcoming movie, Ice Age 2, The Meltdown. They are adverts meant to get into our brains so we will flock to the film.

The display was lit this year by some lad called Lee Ryan, once in a boy band (I am told by my cool 12-year-old daughter) and now a solo artist. What has any of this got to do with the spirit or fables of the main Christian celebration? Where is the choir of tinny, whinging protesters defending their faith and customs? I would join them on this one. This sell-off is damned offensive.

Imagine the furore there would be if instead of Sid and Diego we had a blue-faced Krishna with his flute in his sweet mouth or a meditative Guru Nanak and the symbols of Islam and Judaism gently swaying with the motifs of Christmas. Perhaps secularists would want a logo up there too. What would that say about the country? That we are trying to live and feast together, a nation of many parts and a common soul. And why would that be an affront?

After all, our Christmas "traditions" have not been around for very long, and they are changing all the time, albeit sometimes for the worse. Albert, the German Prince, brought the tree over, a lovely thing to have in the bleak months but nothing at all to do with the story of Christianity. There was no snow or electricity in Bethlehem, so why fairy lights and the sentimental warbling for a white Christmas? And from where He watches over the world, what does the self denying Son of God make of that usurper of Christmas, an annoying, obese junk-food addict with a white beard?

Hunters of the New Scrooge pretend to be defending precious Christian values and customs when what they are really doing is picking fights with blameless non-Christians. This is just another way of letting us know we are resented, will never truly be accepted, that we are forever damned. Actually, most of us quite like wearing silly paper hats and sending cards and even giving wrapped presents (waste of money, I always think when I conform to that foolish cultural expectation.)

What we cannot stand are the excesses - drinking booze until you throw up, merrily spending thousands of pounds on gifts, and then the fact that our children are mostly the goats and sheep in nativity plays and not Mary or Joseph, even though both must have had brown skins and dark eyes. We would not be stupid enough to demand the end of the most important and joyous celebrations in Europe. However, there is something unfair about Christmas hogging so many annual holidays and the presumptions of a dominant culture.

Years ago I went into a primary school in Southall with children who were almost all Asian. The parents loved the nativity story and didn't mind the carols. But they were deeply resentful that teachers expected the children to have trees and presents - practices which were alien to their home lives. The kids were acting up, feeling confused by the two worlds they were living in.

I never used to get into Christmas. Now I do, with all my heart, because ours is a composite family. My children have a dad who was once a choirboy and a mum who loves her Islamic faith. My son has married an Englishwoman, and the time and festivities bind us together, and each year it becomes much more another part of my own hybrid tradition. I would hate it all, though, if I felt I had to pass the Christmas exam to prove I am truly British. The many white Britons living happily in India don't have to run around the streets spraying colour during Holi, or burn oil lamps for Diwali.

What I love so much, and increasingly so, about the ideals built into the Christian religion is its generosity and openness. Unlike most other major religions, it is meant to be kind, to live in peace with others. In fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury just made a speech in Lambeth when he said: "Christmas for a Christian tells us why all people matter." The hacks and jocks who bait us at this time every year are less Christian than I am. And I forgive them their trespasses. Have a lovely Christmas and peaceful new year.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk