After Christmas time

Well that’s it then. Santa Claus has done his job for the year, gone back home, fed his sled and polished his reindeer while we’ve all been polishing off turkey with or without the trimmings.

Listening to “oh, little town of Bethlehem” takes on a different feeling when Bethlehem is about the same distance from Beirut as Birmingham is to London. Yet, sadly, it is probably easier to get to from either of those English cities than it is to travel to it from Beirut.

This year, the Dickensian ideal of a White Christmas has come to pass in London and in some of the mountain villages here in Lebanon. A good friend even invited me to ski with him on Christmas day but I couldn’t accept – I was too busy with mulled wine, champagne and mince pies on offer at another friend’s house about half way up the skiing mountain.

Christmas is not just a time of presents, families, celebrations and over-indulgence, it carries with it connotations of peace, of renewing friendships, of burying enmities, of resolving, or at least patching over, differences. The BBC web-site carried pictures of Christmas celebrants in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bethlehem and Korea. But I don’t get a good feeling about imminent resolution of all conflicts. What is missing for me is the evidence of reaching out, of trying to find points of contact rather than points of difference.

On Boxing Day, I walked into Beirut’s main Bridge Club. And everyone was wishing “merry Christmas” to everyone else with warmth and enthusiasm, even between some whose mutual antipathy had been apparent in times past. Religious adherence didn’t seem to matter, Protestants, Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Muslims of both flavours, Druze and Armenians (whose Christmas is twelve days after 25th December) all joined in, as doubtless did members of all the eighteen official religions or confessions recognized in Lebanon. Forgive me for not listing them all.

Now if only we could capture that and keep it going rather than putting it away with Santa’s sled and the Christmas decorations.