Not my first Christmas in the desert
December 25th, 2007, 7:11 pm · Post a Comment · posted by Aaron
This was not the first Christmas I spent in the desert.
In 2005, I spent Christmas in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
The city was mostly empty around Christmas in 2005. I felt like the only guest in my hotel just up the street from Manger Square. I finished up last-minute Christmas shopping in some of the city’s shops and waited in no lines. Every shop owner I talked that Christmas told me they were expecting more tourists than the last year but still begged me to buy an olive wood nativity set or a Bethlehem 2000 scarf.
Bethlehem 2000 merchandise was everywhere in the city, in 2005. Shop owners thought tourists would flood the city on the first Christmas of the new millennium and brought a surplus of gifts in anticipation. However fighting sparked up between the Israelis and Palestinians that year, and no one came.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, I accepted an invitation by a member of the Hamas-led Bethlehem City Council to ride with him in the annual Christmas parade. I was told to wear blue, a color sympathetic to local militants, as protection just in case something happen.
That morning, we met at the Israeli security barrier, the wall surrounding Bethlehem, and waited for the Catholic Patriarch from Jerusalem to arrive to lead the procession. He was delayed at the checkpoint, a problem with his identification and credentials. Marchers, many of them Muslim, as most of the resident Christian population has fled the city, sang religious Christmas carols, some in English, some in Arabic. During the parade, loud bangs, gunshots perhaps, sounded causing everyone to tense up, but then fireworks appeared in the sky above.
As we wound toward Manger Square, masses of people lined the streets. When we got to the Church of the Nativity, several people broke out guitars, a circle formed. We sang and danced right outside the church where Jesus was born. It began to rain and hail, and we kept dancing. Then we swarmed into the church where we pilgrims prayed.
Later that night, I went to mass at the church. Not fluent in Arabic or Latin, I ducked out the back of the church toward the end of the mass and dashed through the rain to a shop owned by “John,” not his real name, a shop owner who I shared several cups of tea with during my time in Bethlehem. John led me to the back of his shop, into a grotto where several other Palestinians gathered around a fire, sipping tea and coffee. More pilgrims joined us throughout the night. I stayed in John’s cave until early Christmas morning.
That morning, Israeli security forces closed the checkpoint into Bethlehem, no one would get in or out.
Pilgrims play guitar and dance outside the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem in 2005. I was one of the dancers.
Me, in the blue coat, sitting around the fire on Christmas Eve 2005 in John’s shop.
