We moved to Jerusalem from Salt Lake City in 1983 (with 5 kids!). Ancient history, I know, but those felt like modern times back in the day. It was August and hot. All seven of us went instantly into culture shock, and it took a long while to recover.
We did take delight in the fall Jewish holidays. Every aspect was a pleasant surprise, but as fall progressed we encountered pumpkin spice withdrawals and then commercial-Christmas doldrums. Not the kind you experience in the U.S., bemoaning the consumerization of our biggest Christian holiday. This was bemoaning the complete absence of the trappings of Christmas.
In the Holy Land, Christmas can look like just any other day.
Once the Feast of Tabernacles ended in late September, praying for winter rains seemed like the only big deal. The kids and I started wishing Halloween costumes would show up in the stores. I didn’t yet know about the early spring holiday of Purim, which beats Halloween any way you look at it.
One evening I was waiting alone at a bus stop in Gilo, on my way back to our sixth-floor, orange-walled apartment in Ramat Danya. The air was soft and promised rain, but there were no leaves falling, and nowhere to buy candy corn. I suddenly felt very far from home, even though walking Jerusalem’s ancient stones, I had found such a connection with my ancestors.
When November arrived, so did our longing for Thanksgiving dinner. The suq (open air market) in machne yehuda had amazing sliced turkey for sandwiches, but I had never seen a whole turkey in Israel, neither dead nor alive. Luckily, we were invited to the Rona’s house for Thanksgiving. After years in Israel, they had figured the whole thing out. After eating our fill, I discovered a middling-sized turkey cost about $80.
Then, suddenly, it was December. After living in Israel, I began to hate the Christmas song, In the Bleak Midwinter:
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air –
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can, I give Him –
Give my heart.
Uh, no. The last verse is very sweet and the verse before, nearly so. But winter in Israel (if that is indeed when Christ was born, which it probably wasn’t) is far from bleak. That’s when the almond trees begin to blossom. They grow more magnificent as the winter deepens.
In 1983 Christmas was on a Sunday. That’s a regular work and school day in Israel. We stayed home from work and school that day. The two days leading up to Christmas were for us pretty exceptional.
Friday is a special day, because it becomes the Sabbath at sundown. Everyone races around trying to get everything done before the shops close and the buses stop running. Two big things happened for us that day.
First, I managed to borrow a van from the Rona’s to cart six loads of laundry up the hill to a laundromat. Hah. I got all of it washed, but the place shut down for Sabbath before I had a chance to use the dryers. I ended up hanging laundry over every chair and radiator, by hangers hung from whatever could hold them, and from some cord I managed to string around the living room. Voila! Christmas decor.
Also, Friday, being the 23rd of December, was the day that the Israel park service gives out free Christmas trees to Christians. This happens every year at the Jaffa Gate entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City, not always with someone dressed as Santa. The forests are culled for this event, truly a charitable thing to do. But please look carefully at the following picture:
Please note the shape of the Christmas tree. That’s about what ours looked like. We had no decorations, either. We made a long garland of paper rings and that was it. Our cat and toddler-in-rolling-walker conspired together and decimated the tree anyway.
Saturday is church for the LDS Jerusalem Branch. Of course, it was inspiring, though our numbers had dwindled when the BYU students went home. Still, I sat there in sacrament meeting, thinking, “I walked today where Caiaphas walked.”
Things got better as we celebrated seven more Christmases in Israel. We discovered Christmas Eve festivities in Bethlehem and the tinseled shops, in spite of the dwindling number of Christians there. Someone at the Embassy helped us get an artificial tree from Sears. We cleaned up on Christmas decorations during an early December trip to Germany. Our tree actually became a tourist spot, with our Israeli neighbors dropping in to gaze at it.
I became more adept at finding the path Christ trod through a mostly unaccepting land. Now, every Christmas, I gaze at the paintings of ancient Jerusalem and the nativity in Bethlehem, and I’m homesick, longing to be there.
