It's (not really) beginning to look a lot like Christmas (at all)

Sourcing Christmas cards around here has turned out to be a trial of epic proportions, leading only to frustration and eventual failure.  Despite scouring the Christmas shops that have reared their gaudy little heads in the Christian Quarter of the Old City – shops so festooned with decorations inside, they look like Santa Claus exploded and left little pieces of Christmas everywhere – I have had no luck in finding anything suitably Christmas card-esque to send home.  

Christmas shopping in Jerusalem - subtle, it ain't

On one level it’s actually a relief as it means I don’t have to go to the post office, which I really hate doing.  You have to queue for hours, after which time you go to a counter where a surly post office worker makes you feel like you’re the one thing that is making their day worse, then attempts to rip you off selling you insurance for your packages which can only be an indication that someone out in the sorting room is going to break into them and steal their contents.  When I was there earlier this week a man was having a really impressive tantrum, shouting at everyone within a 5-metre radius in Hebrew; alas, I had no Hebrew-speakers with me so remain ignorant of his reasons for yelling, though he was probably just voicing what everybody in the room feels anyway when they are forced to go there and be spoken to like they are all of five years old.  I am therefore taking the low road and choosing to use my blog for the purposes of spreading Christmas cheer instead.  Later this month I shall also use my blog for the purposes of sharing that festive ex-pat tradition, the ‘round robin’ (sorry mum, I know you hate them, but what choice do I have?).

I was initially surprised by the scarcity of Christmas cards.  This is the Holy Land, the land of the birth of Jesus Christ; surely there would be Christmas cards readily available for sale.  However, I was reminded that this in fact a country that is predominantly Jewish, next to countries that are predominantly Muslim, so it’s actually not that surprising that there wouldn’t be Christmas cards for sale in the supermarkets like back home.   You can find Christmas stuff in Christian Arab areas of the West Bank such as Bethlehem, where we sourced our plastic Christmas tree and tacky 5-shekel decorations; you will see a few (a very few) street decorations in the Christian quarter of the Old City; and of course there are the Christmas shops, full of tinsel and baubles and life-size Santa Clauses playing the saxophone or smiling manically.  But around and about there are none of the signs I’m used to from home that we are marching inexorably towards the ‘holiday season’: Christmas decorations and trees in every building; carol singers out and about; radio stations playing Slade’s So here it is, Merry Christmas or good old Sir Paul telling us he’s Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time; mince pies on offer everywhere, though none are as good as Mrs. B’s home-made with marzipan stars.

The most Christmassy I have felt thus far, a week before the happy day itself, was singing carols at the Christmas party thrown by the mid-week young adults group at King of Kings, one of the churches(and Bible studies) I’ve been attending.  It was an ‘ugly sweater’ party, a concept of which I, not being American, had never heard, so my friend Tamar and I spent Wednesday evening decorating two hideous sweaters we found in the lost property box with glitter and slogans such as ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ only to find that we were the only people in the room who’d bothered to make an effort.  Credit should be give to Tamar's creative genius, as she was the one responsible for the epic amounts of glitter on my jacket, making my clothing a bit more Lady Gaga than my usual style.

Classy, no?

We ate turkey with bread sauce and drank hot ‘cider’, though it wasn’t actually cider; people in this country call apple juice that’s been warmed up cider, so clearly they’ve never been to the West Country or had the dubious joy of drinking home-brew from the Cheese and Grain in Frome at a Seth Lakeman gig (shout out to Damien Dacey who managed to get through a whole pint of the stuff without throwing up).  Anyway, the highlight for me was when the group sang a selection of carols and it finally felt like Christmas was on its way, despite the group leader Jamie, who was on guitar, telling me (after I’d sang the opening lines of It Came Upon the Midnight Clear) that we couldn’t do English tunes to the songs as they were the wrong ones.

The upshot of having the trappings of a western Christmas completely stripped from the whole experience is that it makes you seriously reconsider the meaning and value of celebrating Christmas.  Biblically, Jesus was actually born during the Feast of the Tabernacles, or Sukkot, which is in the autumn, so celebrating his birth in December is a few months off the actual events.  I had to deliver an assembly to the secondary school yesterday about Christmas and it occurred to me, as I tried to plan something around Christmas traditions and the whole idea of advent, that actually the reality of Christmas was not as simple or easy as the story we’ve all heard time after time after time.  Philip Yancey, one of my favourite authors, writes that “The fact of Christmas, rhymed in carols, recited by children in church plays, illustrated on cards, have become so familiar that is easy to miss the message behind the facts.  After reading the birth stories once more, I ask myself, If Jesus came to reveal God to us, what do I learn about God from that first Christmas?”  Stripping Christmas down to its bare bones allows me to concentrate on that last question.  If Christ came to reveal God to us (Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate deity) then his birth is a very important event and the nature of it reveals a lot about the God that I love, and follow, and doubt, and get angry with, and rely upon.

I’m still pondering that question, because in coming down to earth God revealed just how he loves us in Christ’s willingness to (as it says in Philippians) ‘make himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant’.  There’s a lot to it, more than I have room or time to ruminate on in this particular forum, so I find myself turning back to Philip Yancey for guidance, as well as dipping into Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross and re-reading the gospel stories and trying to get new perspective on a very familiar chain of events.  Whatever the outcome, this feels very different to the process and procedures of Christmas back home.  It would appear that my Christmas in Jerusalem is going to be fairly un-Christmassy, that in fact it’s not really beginning to look like Christmas at all.  Sorry, Dean Martin.