But this year, like last year, there are no decorations, and almost nothing to buy in the shops. Meat is difficult to find and extremely expensive. After more than 14 months of this seemingly endless war, there is very little to celebrate: for Muslims and Christians alike. I am Muslim, but we are all “people of the book” — and relations between our communities have always been characterised by warmth and respect. And now, especially, we are united, by hunger and hardship and death, without a future whatever our faiths.

A few years ago, a farmer’s spade struck something hard as he tilled his land west of the Nuseirat refugee camp. It was the start of an amazing discovery: beneath the sand lay the monastery of St Hilarion, which dates back to 340 AD and has become a major archaeological site. Hilarion was born and spent much of his life in what is now the Gaza Strip. He began the process of converting its inhabitants from paganism, the dawn of a local Christian community that remains among the oldest on earth.

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Gaza's children have no future

By Hasan Jber

In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza at the end of the Six Day War, there were still some 7,000 Christians here. Their numbers have since fallen to barely 1,000, and now represent a blend of Catholics and Orthodox. Some have emigrated to the West, others to the West Bank or other Arab countries. But small as the community has become, it continues to enjoy an outsized cultural presence. Christians have tended to be better educated than the Palestinian average, partly because of excellent religious schools.

When Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in 2007, there were fears that the relationship between Muslims and Christians would deteriorate, and that they might be persecuted. Fortunately, these worries proved baseless. Hamas understood that Christians shared the same challenges as their Muslim peers, united by the same enemy.

Nowhere was this clearer than at Christmas. Whether Catholic or Orthodox, each Gazan Christian treated the birth of Christ as a great celebration. Many times, I saw Muslims joining in, dressed in their smartest clothes, inside churches brilliantly lit by candles. All the while, choirs sang “Silent Night” between readings from the Gospels. Just as in the West, meanwhile, children’s events and parties would feature appearances from Father Christmas, with Santa’s usual red suit and white beard.

When Hamas launched the October 7 attacks, none of Gaza’s Christians took part. Yet the subsequent experiences of Emad Sayegh would surely be familiar to any Gazan. A week after the assault, Israel told the 61-year-old businessman that he had to leave his home. The area, he was told, was about to be targeted by airstrikes. “There were 11 of us,” Sayegh remembers, “so we hurried to the St Porphyrios church in the Old City. We were afraid, but we found a lot of people there — about 400, most of them Christians, but also 19 Muslim families.”

They may have been among friends, but the situation was desperate. Without enough beds, people slept wherever they could: in rooms, alcoves in the walls and corridors. “I spent four nights trying to sleep upright in a chair,” Sayegh says, “so I was exhausted.” Food was in short supply too. Each day, families had to share a single loaf of bread, alongside a small portion of cooked food. And though water was available from a nearby well, it could only be pumped with a generator — a machine that required expensive fuel to run.

Worse was to follow. On 19 October, 12 days into the war, the church was hit. “The Israelis killed 18 people and injured dozens,” Sayegh says. “We were afraid the killing would continue.”

A few days later, the Israelis told everyone still taking refuge at St Porphyrios to evacuate and move south, where they would have to live in tents. Sayegh says at first they refused, but then a tank shell struck the wall of the church, wrecking a room where four of his sons had been sitting two minutes earlier. At the same time, Sayegh discovered that his nearby metalwork factory had also been destroyed. Like others sheltering in the church, he finally decided to leave.

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My year of horror in Gaza

By Hasan Jber

Also staying at St Porphyrios was a man called George, who asked me not to publish his surname. “The bombing was violent and intense, like an earthquake,” he says. For the moment, he and his family are back there, trying to survive inside its Latin Patriarchate school. That isn’t easy: there are no bedrooms, bathrooms or blankets.

“In earlier years,” he says, “we used to light the church candles and hold prayers on Christmas Eve, visit family and friends and go out to celebrate. Now sadness dominates the atmosphere inside the church, as it does outside. There is no room for joy.”

Other Christian sites have also been destroyed. They include both the ancient Caeserea market, and the Orthodox cultural centre, site of all those workshops and lectures. “Christmas will be just another sad day,” says Elias el-Jelda, who used to help run the centre as a member of the Arab Orthodox church council. “I believe Christ is grieving with us.”

Muslims like me feel much the same. Earlier this month, my brother’s house was badly damaged when the Israelis bombed a nearby mosque — the fifth time it’s been struck since the war began. My brother’s daughters were also injured, and earlier this year his son was killed in Rafah.

Like Gaza’s Christians, none of us has ever belonged to a militant faction. None of us are combatants. For many years, my brother happily commuted from Gaza to Israel, where he worked in construction. But then Hamas took over, and Israel built the separation barrier. Since then, he has been unemployed.

Elias el-Jelda tells me that, this Christmas, he and other Christians will concentrate on personal prayers, “asking God to stop our suffering, and to bring peace and justice to Gaza and the world.” I will offer the same prayers.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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The myth of 'pagan' Christmas

By Tom Holland

It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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O come, all ye faithless

By Boyd Tonkin

Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.