Santa Claus Uses Camel In Bethlehem

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30633, 26 December 1964, Page 18

Santa Claus Uses Camel In Bethlehem

(N.Z.P.A.- Reuter—Copyright)

BETHLEHEM (Jordan), December 22.

Although he speaks in Arabic, and uses a camel instead of reindeer, Santa Claus comes to Bethlehem each year in much the same way as he does anywhere else in the world.

He comes to distribute gifts, to praise the good and scold the naughty, to delight the elders and sometimes frighten the young.

Each year, Santa Claus becomes more and more important to the Bethlehem Christian family’s celebration of Christmas. A Western tradition, enthusiastically adopted only two generations ago along with the Christmas tree, Father Christmas has become increasingly a highlight of the season’s festivities. Traditional Activities But there is one major difference between the typical Western Christmas celebration and the festivities here, in the place where Christ was born. Whereas in the Western world, preparations are mainly concentrated on buying gifts, in Bethlehem a family prepares for the great event by a whole series of traditional activities. For the people of Bethlehem, Christmas is still, basically, a time for worship and family reunions. The shopping begins in early autumn, for materials must be chosen for new clothes, nuts, dates, sugar, spices, coffee and other food supplies must be bought and stored ready for baking day. Old and worn household goods are replaced or repaired, and linen replenished. The dressmaker and the tailor are brought in, to measure, cut out, and sew new Christmas garments for each member of the family to wear to church on Christmas Eve. New Shoes are also bought. There is no last-minute shopping here. So many things are made to order, by hand, and at home, that preparations must begin weeks ahead. House Cleaned Two weeks before Christmas, the house is given a thorough cleaning. Windows are flung open, and the crisp, cold air of a Bethlehem December carries the clean scents of olive oil soaps and furniture polishes throughout the sunlit town.

Woodwork, ceilings, walls, windows, and marble floors are scrubbed and polished to a sparkling newness: carpets,

draperies, mattresses and linen are swept and aired, washed and ironed. The children are set to polishing brass and copper trays and vases, silver flatware and candlesticks. Among the children, excitement mounts with the approach of a whole week of baking days. Housewives in every family gather together and help each other shell the walnuts and stone the dates for the fillings for the small traditional Christmas cakes, called ma’moul. Each cake is decorated on top with stars and sprinkled with castor sugar. Neighbourhood Ovens At lash the pastries are ready. Laid out on large baking sheets, they are carried very carefully to the neighbourhood oven—a wide, long, brick baker’s oven—where the children hold their vigil through the baking, with constant admonitions to the baker of “watch, don’t let them burn.” Later the cakes will be sprinkled with powdered sugar, then stored in readiness for the feast day. There is little else to do now. The children have been sent off to the seamstress, to the tailor, to the cobbler; the closets hold the bright new garments, the stiff and shining shoes; the cakes are in the cupboard. The coffee has been roasted (slowly turned in a cylinder cone over a charcoal fire) and ready to be freshly ground in the brightlypolished brass hand coffee grinder before each brewing of coffee. As Christmas Eve approaches, ornaments, kept carefully from year to year, are unpacked and hung on the Christmas tree —a large assortment of gossamer balls and bells, Diaphanous birds with feathered tails, tinsel, angels and stars, and newlyguilded pine cones and walnut shells, gathered and painted by the children in the previous weeks. The most-treasured Christmas possession of all, however, is the crib, carefully arranged on a low table near the tree. Its graceful figures

of Joseph and Mary, the wise men, the shepherd and his flock, and the little donkey, grouped round the small manger of the Christ child, are fashioned by skilled carvers of Bethlehem out of local olive wood. No Christian home in Bethlehem is without its crib. Finally, celebrations begin on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Scrubbed, combed, and neatly dressed, the children are ready hours before the family trip to Shepherd’s field. There, at the place where, according to tradition, the angel brought the shepherds news of Christ’s birth, they join with pilgrims from many parts of the world in a carol service. Flat, Round Loaves The service is followed by a traditional shepherd’s supper of flat, round loaves, barbecued lamb, and olives served in a large, natural cave nearby. The evening brings the highlight of the festivities as the whole family gathers in the house of its senior member to eat all the good things prepared during the preceding weeks. Fruit salad topped with mounds of cream, ma’moul cakes, nuts, chocolates, roast chestnuts and the rest are washed down with red wine made from the local monasteries of Latrun and Cremisan.

As the coffee, delicately flavoured with either cardamon seed or a drop of rose water, is being drunk, Santa Claus arrives to distribute his gifts before the bells ring out their Christmas message and the family goes off to church.

As midnight strikes, church towers and rooftops all over the town sudenly become a blaze of light with stars of Bethlehem.