St. Nicholas Eve
I’m putting out a little bit of Christmas, and came across these lovely, Palestinian embroidered towels. I’ve had them for around thirty years, and I still love them:
I’m also thinking – we in the west never hear about Palestinian Christians, of which there are / or used to be (?) many. I know there are groups in Jerusalem, working towards the use of Jerusalem as an inter-faith city, and I know they work closely with Palestinian Christians, but are the numbers of Palestinian Christians as large as they used to be?
Advent is a little like Ramadan, or it is supposed to be. The four weeks leading to Christmas are a time for thoughtful meditation, repentance of wrongful things we have done, and contemplating the birth of that special baby, the Gift of God, in Bethlehem. I love Advent; I love the whole peaceful focus and world-holding-its-breath-waiting-for-this-birth aspect.
A mosaic portrait of St. Nicholas:
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Here There and Everywhere 
I lived in Ramallah, Palestine for a couple of years. It used to be a “Christian” town. Now the Christians are a minority. One day we were in Bethlehem buying Christmas gifts in a tourist shop owned by a Palestinian acquaintance of ours.
He told the story of an American couple who’d come in his store and how they’d started talking about religion. When he said he was a Christian, they seemed surprised. He was a Palestinian, right? So how did that happen?
He said: About two thousand years ago, right here in Bethlehem.
Oh, Miss Footloose, that is a GREAT story. I totally love it.
I haven’t visited Bethlehem since the 1980’s. It gave me the creeps. We think of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” and the shepherds in the hills, and now you go there and there are Israeli soldiers with machine guns on the tops of all the buildings. An atmosphere of fear stinks up the streets. So much for ‘peace on earth, good will to men.’