Thousands of faithful celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM, West Bank—Thousands of pilgrims and tourists from around the world together with local Christians gathered in the biblical town of Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas Eve in the traditional birthplace of Jesus, with spirits lifted by a slowdown in recent violence and cool, clear weather.

Security was tight in Bethlehem after recent deadly attacks on Christian targets in neighboring Egypt and Jordan by Islamic extremists.

Yet the faithful braved the chilly weather outside the town’s Manger Square as traditional Christmas songs like “Jingle Bells” played in Arabic over loudspeakers and scout groups paraded with bagpipes and sang carols. Elated tourists and local Christians alike wandered around the square illuminated by festive red and golden lights and a large Christmas tree, visiting souvenir shops and restaurants.

Adding to the holiday spirit for the Palestinians, locals celebrated a key diplomatic victory at the United Nations the day before, where the Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Sharolyn Knight, a 28-year-old teacher from Georgia, said she was in Bethlehem for the first time and experiencing mixed emotions. “It’s been sobering and humbling because it’s a place with a lot of heavy stuff, religious and historical. At the same time, disillusioning because there is so much strife in the place where Jesus was born.”

She said she would come back again, maybe next time with her kids.

“It’s very unique, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Rodrigo Reis, 23, who came from Louisville, Kentucky, “It’s very meaningful, its Christmas time, where everything started.”

Christian clergymen welcomed the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land inside the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, the birth place of Jesus Christ, as Christians worldwide begin to prepare to celebrate Christmas this year.

The Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate, is the temporary chief clergyman to the local Catholic population. He traveled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Saturday in a traditional procession. Later, he was to celebrate Midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, built at the grotto revered as Jesus’ birthplace.

“I wish this joyous atmosphere of Christmas will continue in the year and not just for a few days and I hope the coming year will bring a little more serenity and peaceful relations in our country. We need it,” he said.

“I am happy that the war, at least the military war, in Aleppo is finished and that for the first time in Aleppo the Christians can celebrate without fear the Christmas season. I wish that they can now reconstruct, rebuild the city, not only the infrastructure but also the common relations that was a tradition over there,” he told The Associated Press.

The Syrian government assumed full control of Aleppo earlier this month when rebels, including some Islamic militants, agreed to withdraw from their last remaining enclave after more than four years of heavy fighting over the country’s largest city.

Christmas festivities brought a boost of holiday cheer to Christians in the Holy Land, who make up just a small percentage of the population. The region has which has experienced a wave of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed that erupted over a year ago. The violence has tapered off in recent months, but has not halted completely.

Rula Maaya, the Palestinian minister of tourism, said all the hotels in Bethlehem were fully booked.

“Bethlehem is celebrating today, we are receiving tourists from all over the world,” Maaya said. “All people over the world are looking at Bethlehem so we hope more and more tourists will come during the year and that next year we will celebrate Christmas without occupation.”

Maaya spoke a day after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Julie Suhain, 20, from Ramallah said she was delighted with the UNSC resolution.

“It’s like getting a Christmas gift,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

Despite the Christmas cheer, Mideast politics loom large in the background—the concrete barrier that surrounds parts of Bethlehem is just one hulking reminder. It was built by Israel last decade during the second Intifada, or uprising, when Palestinian suicide bombers attacked buses and cafes.

Israeli says the barrier is meant to keep out Palestinian attackers, but because it dips inside the West Bank, Palestinians see it as a land grab that also stunts their economy.

Security was tight in Bethlehem after recent attacks on Christian targets in Egypt and elsewhere in the region by Islamic extremists.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

A test of Christmas conscience

‘We don’t do Christmas. We save the money, spend it on ourselves for once. Not a dime on food we won’t eat or clothes we won’t wear or gifts no one needs… It’s a boycott…”

That’s Luther Krank making a prodigious proposition to his wife, Nora, in a favorite Christmas novel of ours.

Plotted so simply it takes only 177 pages to tell—and tell in considerately leaded print yet—the novel is the most uncharacteristic by John Grisham. It is not any of the legal thrillers he has made his name for, but it’s the one Grisham we have chosen to keep, in fact the only Grisham this little condominium nest in which Chit and I have been living our simplified senior lives can take for volumes. And how it has proved worth the keeping—it’s the one title that leaps at us in these morally anxious times!

As light and funny as the times it is related to are grave, indeed tragic, “Skipping Christmas” (Doubleday, 2001) would seem an irreverent point of reference. It’s about a couple who, left alone this one Christmas, decides to, well, skip it, leave the neighborhood to its suddenly senseless and wasteful communal traditions, and fly away on Christmas Day itself, for “10 days of total luxury” on a cruise! It’s certainly no way to do an occasion that precisely calls for selflessness and moderation—if Christmas is indeed that.

As it happens, it is a case where the moral lies in the perversity—in the self-centeredness, in the profligacy, in the whole hypocrisy that surrounds Christmas.

At no time has our own Christmas conscience, as a nation, come under a test so severe as now. The occasion is a tragedy that compares with no other: Whole communities laid waste by a typhoon of unequaled fury, 6,000 dead and counting. And what facile reaction among the untouched: How to do Christmas without appearing insensitive.


Twisted

It’s a reaction in the same sick class as the old wisecrack that passes for native, popular wisdom, here updated:

Before we proceed to gorge ourselves at Christmas, let’s be reminded of our starved brethren in Leyte, so that they may be able, at least in spirit, to partake with us.

Something is definitely morally twisted here. Christmas is no mere red date on the calendar, no blanket excuse for making merry, let alone in the most abysmal sense. Christmas is a noble spirit; it lifts and redeems and moves the inhabited as profoundly as he is seized by it.

Although, by force of tradition, it is activated more at this time of year than at any other, it chooses no season. And one thing it precisely cannot ignore is such cries as those issuing from Leyte.

Leyte, to be sure, is no simple case of fate—unstoppable, unchangeable, therefore excusable. It’s been brought to its desperate pass strictly by human hands, conscienceless, plundering hands acting out of the old self-feeding habit of greed and working schemes that, by the exploitation of the environment for profit, have left the masses of already poor vulnerable yet to the elements; and, by official corruption, have robbed them of their due from the wealth and opportunities their own nation has to offer.

Lest they be mistaken for pleas for charity or philanthropy, the cries from Leyte are only rightful demands for payback for moral debt owed generations that cannot be even remotely assuaged—but in fact mocked—by skipping Christmas.

Memorable, too, though not as resonant as “Skipping Christmas,” probably because its title lacks the ring that suits the times and its Christmas setting feels but incidental, is an even shorter novel (101 pages), actually down-billed as a mere “tale”: “A Different Kind of Christmas” (Random House, 1988). It’s one of two books we’ve kept by Alex Haley; the other being his Pulitzer Prized “Roots.”

It’s a morality tale more direct and timeless with its message than “Skipping Christmas,” and not light or funny at all. It’s about a young man from 19th-century North Carolina who forsakes family and class, and all the power, privilege and wealth that go with it, to lead a mass escape of slaves, some his family’s own, into freedom on Christmas Eve.

Now, that, for all its relative shortcoming in salesmanship, makes for a more felicitous inspiration.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net