The 25 destinations for 25 December picked out in this survey give just a glimpse of the range of possibilities.From experience, I commend Cuba – where Christmas was recently legalised, but has yet to be commercialised – and Krabi in Thailand, where the locals celebrate 25 December with an exuberance unusual among Buddhists. We Christmas Capricorns – who number about 160,000 in the UK – have a tricky annual quest: to find somewhere exceptional to mark the day chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ, and our own arrival in the world.
Happily, the options get wider each year. Goodness, only three months and I’ll be another year older. Unless you are one in 365 of the population, you will not know the extra dimension that a Christmas birthday brings to 25 December.

Rooms with frescoes cost from €450 (£321) including breakfast LG. The palazzo’s cobbled courtyard is overflowing with climbing roses, and next to the Renaissance villa is the tiny 12th-century private chapel of San Martino. In the rooms and corridors, you can see many of the palazzo’s original frescoes.Palazzo Arzaga 25080 Carzago di Calvagese della Riviera, Italy (00 39 030 680 600; ) Double rooms from €236.50 (£169). Doubles from $346 (£204) room only SLPalazzo Arzaga, ItalyDeep in the Lombardy countryside, between Lake Garda and the Alps, is Palazzo Arzaga, an elegant 15th-century palace that has recently been transformed into a luxury spa and golf resort. The original Renaissance-style banquet hall, the Suvarna Mahal, is now the Rambagh’s dining room.The Rambagh Palace, Bhawani Singh Road, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India (00 91 141 2211 919; ). The Maharaja’s bedroom is now the royal suite overlooking the gardens. Butlers breeze through the palace dressed in traditional Jaipur Shermanis, while elephant polo takes place regularly on the palace’s polo fields, with the Maharaja’s trophies adorning the cabinets of the hotel’s Polo Bar.

Doubles from $453 (£266) including breakfast SLRambagh Palace, IndiaThe Rambagh Palace was built in 1835 as a hunting lodge and converted into a palace in 1925 by the Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur, who used it as his summer residence. His widow, the Rajmata Gayatri Devi, still lives in one of its wings. The palace became a hotel in 1957 and today guests can delight in its regal four-poster beds, walk-in wardrobes and opulent marble bathrooms. Renovations to the palace have been sympathetic and feature intricate mosaic ceilings in the banqueting room, chandeliers and Turkish rugs in the foyer. The luxurious Sultan Suite boasts floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Bosphorus.The Ciragan Palace Hotel, (00 90 212 326 4646; ), Ciragan Caddesi 32 Besiktas, Istanbul, Turkey. The palace was rebuilt several times by resident sultans between the 16th century and its final refurbishment in 1910, when it was restored after a fire. Today, guests can enjoy sumptuous interiors with accommodation divided between suites in the original palace and modern rooms in the adjacent hotel.