Christmas in India, when the north has its best weather

Northern India has three seasons that matter to a visitor. There is a fierce hot season from April to June, when Delhi regularly passes forty degrees. The monsoon follows, bringing relief and a great deal of water. Then comes the cool, dry winter from roughly October to March. December sits in the middle of that winter, and on the plains it brings bright, dry days, typically warm enough for shirtsleeves at noon, and cold nights and early mornings that call for a fleece. It is the time when sightseeing is a pleasure rather than an endurance test, and it happens to coincide with Christmas.

There is one complication. In December and January, the Indo-Gangetic plain is prone to thick winter fog, especially in the early morning, and it can delay flights and trains around Delhi. It usually lifts by late morning, and it is worth building a little slack into the day.

Christmas in a Hindu and Muslim country

India is not a Christian country, but it has a long-established Christian community of many millions. Christmas, known in Hindi as Bada Din, the "big day", is a national holiday. In Delhi, the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral draws large crowds for midnight mass, and hotels, shops and markets in the big cities put up decorations. It is a lighter, more incidental Christmas than at home, but very much present, and often enjoyed by Indians of every faith.

The triangle and beyond

The standard first trip to India is the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, and a Christmas departure gives it the best of the weather. Travelsphere's Beyond the Golden Triangle at Christmas, nine nights, adds two important extras. One is Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned red sandstone capital built by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century. The other is Ranthambore, the national park between Agra and Jaipur known for its tigers, where game drives in the early morning are cold in December, so gloves and a hat are worth packing.

Fatehpur Sikri is one of the strangest places in India. Akbar built it in the 1570s as his new capital, near the home of a Sufi saint who had foretold the birth of his son. It was a complete city of palaces, courtyards, a great mosque and a monumental victory gate, the Buland Darwaza. Within about fifteen years it had been largely abandoned, probably because of problems with the water supply as much as politics. Because nobody rebuilt it, the red sandstone courtyards survive almost as they were left, and in the low December light they are particularly beautiful.

Travelsphere's longer version, Beyond the Golden Triangle at Christmas with Shimla Add-on, thirteen nights, goes north into the hills to Shimla and Chandigarh. Shimla, at about two thousand metres in the Himalayan foothills, was the summer capital of British India. Its main ridge still has a neo-Gothic church and a mock-Tudor library, and in December it is cold, sometimes snowy, and quite unlike the plains. Chandigarh, by contrast, is a modernist city planned by Le Corbusier in the 1950s, all concrete and grids, and a striking contrast with everything else on the route.

Varanasi and the Ganges

Just You's Spirit of India at Christmas, twelve nights for solo travellers, goes in a different direction. After Delhi, Jaipur, Ranthambore and Agra, it travels east to Lucknow and Varanasi. Lucknow was the capital of the Nawabs of Awadh, whose courtly culture produced some of the finest buildings and cooking in northern India. Its great vaulted Imambara and its slow-cooked kebabs and biryanis are reason enough to go. It is also the site of the long siege of the British Residency in 1857, whose ruins are still preserved.

Varanasi, on the Ganges, is one of the holiest cities in Hinduism and among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Its riverfront is lined with ghats, stone steps leading down to the water, where pilgrims bathe at dawn and the evening ceremony of light, the aarti, is performed each night. In December the river at dawn is often misty and cold, and very beautiful. Nearby is Sarnath, where the Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon after his enlightenment.

Whichever you choose, a December in northern India is the country at its most comfortable. It is also a reminder that for a great many people, Christmas has never meant snow.