Christmas Celebrations Around the World (In Pictures)

From BBC.com

 

Christians around the world are marking Christmas Day, the traditional day of Jesus Christ's birth.

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his annual Urbi et Orbi Christmas message to the world.

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where tradition has it Jesus was born, was full of worshippers for midnight Mass.

Not too far off in Gaza City, Palestinian Christians gathered for a message of peace.

In war-torn Iraq, Christians had to go through heavy security to reach the church.

Similar - even though lower-key - security checks were being carried out outside St Thomas church in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

In China, many celebrated Mass in government approved Catholic churches, such as this one in Beijing.

In the Russian capital, Moscow, there were fireworks by the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception.

In Delhi, India, worshippers lit candles outside Sacred Heart Cathedral.

Many celebrated by having a good time outdoors - including these women posing for photos on Bondi beach in Sydney.

In Berlin, members of the city's swim club were also having fun - in the icy water of Lake Oranke.

Christmas in the Arab World: Hope in Iraq but little stability in Lebanon

Christmas in the Arab World: Hope in Iraq but little stability in Lebanon

From AKI

Beirut, 21 Dec. (AKI) - As Christmas approaches, Lebanese church leaders believe Christians are facing great challenges. They say religious divisions between Christian, Shia and Sunnis are becoming more entrenched and many Christians have begun leaving Beirut.

Father Antoine Khadra, president of the Association of Christian Lebanese Journalists and head of the Convent of Saint Nohra, said he hopes that Christmas brings stability to the country.

"The Lebanese are not doing well, " he said in an interview with Adnkronos International (AKI). "To live in peace you need stability. For us, as the church, it is not easy to enourage people to celebrate.

"Spirituality is important, but we also need stability to live."

He said many schools and communities had cancelled their festivities and the economic situation was also difficult since everything had become very expensive.

Missionary Dany al-Hayek from the Salesian Don Bosco House in El Hossun, in the country's north, said "we don't feel much about Christmas this year".

Christian leaders say last week's fatal attack on General Francois al-Hajj, a Maronite Christian, not only shocked the country but was a serious setback to attempts to elect a new president after Emile Lahoud stood down on 23 November.

The country has been undergoing its worst political crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

Monsignor Hanna Alwan, rector from the Maronite College of Rome, told AKI that the Lebanese were looking for peace because concern about the presidential vote and a weak economy had created a malaise in the country.

"We don't know what kind of future awaits Lebanon, like what will happen with the presidential elections," he told AKI. "There is neither peace nor serenity for the holidays."

Meanwhile many Christian and Muslim Lebanese are said to be fleeing the country, seeking work and stability abroad in the Persian Gulf, in the US and Europe.

"The Christian community is diminishing," said Hayek. "Christians have aspirations, they want to live well. They want to guarantee a better life for their children, while Muslims have a degree of tolerance for the greater difficulties."

In Iraq, Christian leaders are more positive about the future. The patriarchal vicar of the Chaldean Christian church in Iraq and the world, Shlemon Warduni, has called on Christians and Muslims to welcome the new year with open arms and hearts filled with love.

In an interview with AKI, Warduni said people won't be taking part in popular festivities in churches and Christian communites as they did in the past, but in their homes with relatives and friends.

Meanwhile, the bishop of the Chaldean Christian church in Mosul, Bulos Faraj Rahou, said he was more optimistic than in the past, saying security in the city had recently improved with the deployment of more police.

"The country is heading towards a period of celebrations to coincide with Christmas, New Year and the Festival of the Sacrifice. As a result, the whole country is on holiday," he told AKI.

In Jordan, the secretary-general of the Latin diocese of Amman, Hanna Kaldani, stressed the need for religious dialogue between Muslims and Christians to improve human rights, dignity and freedom.

"Christians and Muslims can find common agreement on diverse issues," Kaldani told AKI.

A member of Jordan's Islamic-Christian committee and consultant to the Pontifical council for interreligious dialogue in Rome, Kardani said the greatest threat was the "extremely negative" influence of extreme religious ideology.

In Syria, the patriarchal vicar of the Greek Orthodox Church, Ghattas Hazim, said peace and stability were missing from the Arab world.

He told Adnkronos International (AKI) he hoped the new year would bring peace and well-being in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Sudan, but above all in Palestine where there is a great need for it.

Sombre Christmas in Iraq

From Al Jazeera

Sombre Christmas in Iraq

By Linda Isam Haddad and Nihal Salem

Rita and Maria Farid, two Iraqi Christians living in the central Baghdad district of Karrada, did not want to celebrate Christmas this year and only bought a tree at the last minute.

"Christmas is very difficult for us. It's a time for family and friends, and this year for the first time, our family is incomplete," Maria Farid said.

In early May, Majid Farid, their brother, was killed in a car bomb blast as he walked to a currency exchange centre not far from the family home.

"He was going to convert Iraqi dinars to dollars to go to Jordan and meet a lovely Iraqi woman he had hoped to marry," Maria recalled.

"We knew something had happened to him immediately. I tried calling him on his mobile phone, but I couldn't get through and I just knew."

Rita and Maria sit with their backs to the small, plastic Christmas tree which has been relegated from the centre of the family room, to an unobtrusive corner near the door.

"We didn't even want to put up a tree," Rita says quietly. "But we did not want to depress relatives and friends and remind them constantly of that terrible day we lost Majid."

The Farid family is one of the relatively few Iraqi Armenian families remaining in the predominantly Shia area of Karrada. They moved from Basra to Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-1980s due to heavy bombing in southern Iraq.

Although most Iraqi Armenians observe Christmas on January 6, Maria's mother is Chaldean Catholic.

She said: "In past years, we'd go to the church on Christmas Eve and spend Christmas Day visiting friends and family and attending Christmas parties. Then in January we'd have our personal family Christmas, sitting around our tree and exchanging gifts."

Christmas past

In San Diego, California, Jennifer Hanna, 53, also a Chaldean Christian from Karrada, prepares to celebrate this Christmas with her husband and three children.

She said: "Celebrating in San Diego reminds me of the days I celebrated Christmas with my family in Iraq, before I moved to America.

"We would go to church and celebrate Christmas festivities in our communities among our Muslim neighbours."

Hanna said her family would serve delicious homemade Iraqi sweets to their Christmas visitors, just as she will this year, but jokes about how she now buys her sweets from the many Iraqi bakeries sprinkled around San Diego.

Hanna's tone changes to sombre as she explains that many Christians are fleeing their homes in Iraq to escape the dangers of "the extremist outsiders who are creating fear and terror among the Christian communities in Iraq".

Hanna said: "My brother and his wife moved to Jordan to escape the violence and it is their Muslim neighbours who are protecting their home in Iraq now.

"Iraqis have got along and this is what I experienced when I lived in Iraq. My best friend who I would have sleepovers with was Shia."

According to figures compiled by the Chaldean Federation of America (CFA), which provides humanitarian relief for displaced Chaldeans in and outside Iraq, 1.2 million Iraqi Christians practiced their faith without fear of persecution before the March 2003 US invasion.

Targeting Christians

Sectarian violence and religious persecution have forced an exodus of Christians to neighbouring countries, with the CFA saying only about 300,000 remain, many of whom are displaced within northern Iraq.

However, the numbers significantly jumped since the June 2007 killing of Father Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean Catholic priest, and three sub-deacons who were with him, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The corpses were then rigged with explosives.

Though he had been threatened numerous times and his Holy Spirit parish attacked, Ganni had refused to leave the country.

Ganni's death followed a trend of assassinations and kidnappings targeting the Christian community which began following the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.

On August 2, 2004, more than a dozen Christian worshippers were killed when five Armenian, Assyrian and Chaldean churches came under co-ordinated attacks in the capital Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul.

Nine other churches were attacked before the end of the year.

Christian merchants who sold alcohol or music tapes and CDs were kidnapped and killed, their shops firebombed for "corrupting Islamic society".

Iraq's Christian heritage

In 2006, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) warned that religiously motivated attacks signalled "an exodus that may mean the end of the presence in Iraq of ancient Christian and other communities that have lived on those same lands for 2,000 years".

The CFA says an estimated 20 percent of Iraqi refugees seeking asylum around the world in 2007 were Christian.

Despite the violence and targeting of the Christian communities in Iraq, Joseph Kassab, executive director of the CFA, said he does not encourage Iraqi Chaldeans to leave Iraq because it is their homeland.

But he acknowledged: "If there is any Christmas celebration in Iraq today, it's a very passive one and quiet one, to say the least."

Alice Marogil, an Iraqi Assyrian married to an Iraqi Chaldean, who left Iraq in 1976, is a social worker with the Chicago-based Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries.

She has worked with at least one hundred Iraqi refugees of both Christian and Islamic faiths in the US.

While she acknowledges that Iraqis once celebrated Christian and Islamic holidays together, she believes as long as extremist militias and foreign terrorists stay in Iraq there will never be an end to the violence.

She said: "I do not see any light at the end of this tunnel. It's a very, very dark one.

"As long as there is no strong leader and government that knows how to take control, the chaos and terror will go on and on. You will see."

Iraqi cardinal's Christmas message: Come back

The spiritual leader of Iraq's Catholics made an appeal Monday for all those who have fled to return and help rebuild their shattered homeland. It might be a tough sell. Iraq's small Catholic community gathered in churches for Midnight Mass in the middle of the afternoon because few will go out after dark. full story

• Fear and Christmas in Iraq
• Christian pilgrims flock back to Bethlehem

Foreigners flock back to Bethlehem

Christian worshippers light candles at the Church of the Nativity, believed to be the birthplace of Jesus.

Foreigners flock back to Bethlehem

Christian pilgrims from all over the world have arrived to celebrate Jesus' birth

Most had been put off visiting Bethlehem since fighting erupted in 2000

But Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in U.S. last month has calmed fears

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) -- Gloom was banished from Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem for the first time in years on Monday as Christian pilgrims from all over the world flocked to celebrate Jesus' birth in an atmosphere of renewed tranquility.

After Israeli-Palestinian fighting erupted in 2000, most of the people milling around Manger Square in the center of this biblical town on Christmas had been local Palestinians.

But this year there were large numbers of tourists from all over the world, back after avoiding the region's strife.

Tiago Martins, 28, from Curitiba, Brazil, said he was excited about visiting. New peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians reassured him that there was no threat to his safety, he said, before crossing from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

"The idea that it's a Christian city makes me more calm, and I think going to the West Bank is more comfortable since Annapolis," Martins said, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian peace conference held in the U.S. last month.

Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh predicted earlier this month that the lull in violence would help to bring about 65,000 tourists to visit to visit the traditional site of Jesus' birth this Christmas -- four times the number who trickled into town for the festivities in 2005.

Still, unmistakable signs of the conflict that has killed more than 4,400 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis in just the past seven years made it clear that peace was not yet at hand.

Gray concrete walls measuring about 25 feet high enclose Bethlehem on three sides -- part of the separation barrier that Israel says it is building to keep out attackers from the West Bank.

Palestinians allege that the complex of concrete slabs and electronic fence, which dips into parts of the West Bank, is a thinly-veiled land grab.

Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the Roman Catholic Church's highest official in the Holy Land, could only reach Bethlehem after passing through a massive steel gate in the barrier. An escort of Israeli mounted policemen led Sabbah, in his flowing gold and burgundy robe, up to the gate, where border policemen waited to clang it shut behind him.

Last week, Sabbah waded into the charged debate over Israel's Jewish character by alleging that Israel's identity as a Jewish state discriminates against non-Jews.

"If there's a state of one religion, other religions are naturally discriminated against," Sabbah -- the first Palestinian to hold the position -- told reporters at his annual pre-Christmas press conference. Israel rejected his claim that people of other faiths do not enjoy equal rights.

According to the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations, there are an estimated 170,000 Christians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

In Gaza, the mood was much more somber than in Bethlehem. Festivities in the poverty-stricken territory's tiny Christian community of 3,000 were decidedly muted.

For decades, Christmas had been marked by an enormous, lavishly-decorated tree in Gaza City's main square, colored lights strung across the plaza and Christmas carols ringing out from loudspeakers. Shopkeepers did a brisk business selling decorations, cards and gifts, but all this cheer evaporated with the outbreak of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in late 2000.

The grimness only deepened this year with the assassination of a prominent Christian activist, Rami Ayyad, after Islamic Hamas militants overran the coastal strip.

There were few outward signs of celebration, and an austere midnight mass was planned at the city's only Roman Catholic church.

Hamas has denied involvement in Ayyad's killing and vowed to find those responsible for his slaying in October.

Early on Monday, hundreds of Gaza Christians lined up at the passenger crossing between Gaza and Israel, hoping to be allowed to cross over to the West Bank to celebrate in Bethlehem. Many of those who hoped to leave said they did not plan to return.

Israel said it would allow in 400 Christmas celebrants from Gaza.