Merry Christmas from Bethlehem
I’ll start with a confession.
I don’t celebrate Christmas. Not really.
Hashtag awkward.
I’m sure pretended to for years, in an effort to assimilate, to be like everyone else. But if I’m honest with myself, I don’t actually care all that much.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, were any talk of religion (“the opiate of the masses”) was generally frowned upon. Less so in the 1980s when I grew up, but it was thoroughly rooted out half a century earlier and my grandparents didn’t even know how to practice it anymore - and so it wasn’t passed onto me.
So it’s the New Year celebrations that has always been the big one, with family squeezed around a big table, a huge pot of Russian salad, an equally huge tray of herring-under-coat, home-made meat aspic (we’d be still eating all those days later for breakfast, lunch and dinner), red caviar (if you’re lucky to get a tiny tin) sparingly applied to some fresh white bread, obligatory clementines, vodka, and of course gifts under the Christmas - I mean, New Year’s - tree.
And as much as I resent the whole-day-cooking extravaganza of boiling vegetables, chopping them into neat cubes (Russian salad) or grating them (the coat)… every year, right on queue, on December 31st, I get a sudden craving for a pot of salad and rush to the shops to get all the ingredients required before the clock strikes midnight.
Even as a child I really didn’t get the point of dressing up and sitting around the living room table (weird and unusual and far away from the kitchen), watching an old man on TV say some meaningless words before a re-run of an old movie until two in the morning and then trying to catch up with your body clock for days. I always wanted to just give gifts whenever I felt like it, rather than waiting for a predetermined date. I also felt really sad for the tree, that had to be thrown away at the end of it all. Maybe it was my demand avoidant autistic self (obviously I didn’t know it at the time), or maybe it was the fact that any family celebration/gathering was fraught with tensions around alcohol (mis)use - I don’t know. Possibly both.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Christmas (the orthodox one, on the 7th of January) was back on the calendar but it never truly caught on. Not for any family I know anyway.
For years after moving to the UK I sort of ignored Christmas, generally escaping London a remote cottage somewhere in Scotland to be close to nature and far, far away from all the people rushing around buying stuff. I’d still wish Merry Christmas to work colleagues and clients but half-heartedly, just saying words I knew I was expected to say.
After my son was born, my then-husband (also the product of the Soviet Union) and I didn’t quite know what to do with Christmas. With both of us being quite averse to obligatory celebrations, we kept quietly celebrating the New Year instead of Christmas. There were still gifts and the tree, of course, and what does the actual date matter anyway, it’s all part of the same pagan mid-winter celebration going back millennia.
When my son got older and all his British friends were doing letters to Santa and Christmas cards, and swapping present stories on Boxing Day (all brand new traditions we needed to quickly become aware of), we sort of had to swerve a bit - usually resulting in some presents for Christmas, and then some more - from this Russian and Ukrainian grandparents - for New Year’s Day.
Now that my son is nearly a teenager - and I’m a single parent - we keep it even simpler. There’s no big dinner (it’s not a holiday for me if I have to spend hours cooking) and instead we’ll drive into Central London on Christmas Day and walk around, drink hot chocolate and look at the lights. We’d drive somewhere to watch the starlings do their winter dance and feel at one with nature for a bit. Maybe we go visit his grandparents (that became rather difficult lately, first with Covid, and then with the war) or go find snow somewhere else. We winter and sleep a lot.
But we don’t really “do Christmas” in any sort of conventional sense - we never really did.
Someone on the interwebs once said “Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people” and I fully subscribe to that. Some traditions are wonderful, and meaningful, and should be cherished and passed on. But traditions that turn toxic, are not enjoyable, that lose all of its original meaning in the pursuit of capitalism - I refuse to participate. I make up my own instead.
But back to Bethlehem.
Did you know that this year Christmas is cancelled in the birthplace of Jesus? The Church of the Nativity - built on top of the cave where Christians believe Jesus was born - cancelled all Christmas celebrations due to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza which most human rights activists agree is an active genocide. In just 75 days over 20 thousand people have been killed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, including over 10 thousand children. Over 25 thousand children lost one or both of their parents, and hundreds of entire families have been wiped out completely, with no surviving members of the extended family left.
Yeah.
Sorry to bring down the mood. This is the reality of Christmas in Palestine, the birthplace of the man the whole Western world celebrates in just a couple of days.
All this - naturally - is being done with financial support (and obstructionism in the UN) of the United States and the silent but telling blessing of the UK, and I don’t think I’d ever be able to look at Christmas the same way again.
I wish I could end this on a better note, with some wise words of advice, or a “love and light” message that all will be well.
But I don’t have it in me. Not after watching genocide live-streamed to me on my phone, and the whole world merrily ignoring it.
All I want for Christmas is a free Palestine and the end of all wars over resources, and for us to coexist peacefully on this miraculous planet during this one precious life that we have. This is actually not a lot to ask - or is it?
Instead of Christmas cards - once again, because frankly why are we spending £5 on a piece of paper that’s going to go in the trash shorty after, how crazy is that?! - I’m going to donate the money to organisations that are helping Palestinians get through this nightmare - Medical Aid for Palestinians’ Gaza Appeal and Doctors without Borders.
Here’s a video the Palestinian Mission in the UK has released the other day.