My first post here was in December, back in 2017.  It’s become a habit to come back to this space each Christmas season to reflect on how we’re observing the traditions of this time of year.

Last year, Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, did not celebrate Christmas. According to an NPR article from November 2023, “Palestinian leaders of Christian denominations here came together, and citing the devastating war in Gaza made a unanimous decision to cancel public celebrations.” (source)

Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem said, “I always say we need to de-romanticize Christmas. . . In reality, it’s a story of a baby who was born in the most difficult circumstances and the Roman Empire under occupation, who survived the massacre of children himself when he was born. So the connection was natural to us.”

A year later, the situation in Palestine is unspeakably bleak. With this backdrop, I’m preparing to take my kids to the local Victorian Stroll in costume, which we’ve done for several years now. This morning, I had my tea with oatnog instead of oat milk. The kids cleaned the living room and brought out the stockings and our collection of holiday books.We’re trying to find a time that works to get a tree. I’m struggling to reconcile current events with any sense of celebration.

Last year, I bought The First Advent in Palestine in February, a month and a half after Christmas. Our regular devotional book that I do with the kids wrapped a couple of days ago. It was just in time to pull The First Advent in Palestine off the shelf for the first time since it arrived, to read together for Advent.

The author, Kelley Nikondeha, is a liberation theologian, who, according to her bio, “combines biblical texts and various cultural contexts to discover insights for embodied justice, community engagement, and living faith.” Liberation theology, I can get behind.

The book switches between telling a story of the author’s spiritual journey, starting in childhood, and telling Bible stories that set the stage for the first Advent. I don’t think the book is actually for kids. Maybe it’s the pacing, maybe it’s the accessible way the book is written, but the kids are paying attention, making connections, and not complaining when I choose to read another page.

Alongside our Advent reading, we’re reading a couple of poems a day from Mosab Abu Toha’s new book, A Forest of Noise. Toha escaped Gaza with his family last November, in a harrowing experience that involved being separated from his wife and three children and detained by the Israeli occupation. He was freed after an international outcry, and taken to a hospital due to injuries sustained when he was beaten while in custody. In Israel, poets are considered terrorists.

Since then, Toha has spoken publicly about his experience and posted news from Gaza regularly on social media, which he obtains from the extended family he had to leave behind and other contacts. Half of the poems were written before October 7, 2023, and the steady theme of violence at the hands of the occupation which connect the poems (poems written before and after October 7 are indistinguishable to me) is telling.

I still don’t know how to write without talking about Gaza. I’m horrified that our nation has decided to allow ethnic cleansing to continue for over a year, perpetrated by U.S. weapons and military aid.

It’s difficult to celebrate amid a steady parade of chilling images from Gaza: dead babies and children, hysterical children and parents, bent over the bodies of their loved ones. Disgusting photos of Israeli soldiers mocking the destruction they’ve caused, destroying homes, bakeries, and libraries, and bombing residential buildings for fun. There is a “turn Gaza into a parking lot” demand, and what so many people don’t realize is that it basically IS a parking lot already.

This year, in addition to Gaza, there is widespread violence and destruction in the West Bank and Lebanon. Now Syria is suffering amidst a confusing conflict with far too many outside actors providing arms to different factions. Horrifying stories are coming out of Sudan. And the Democratic Republic of Congo continues to be exploited for minerals, with little kids laboring for just a few dollars a day in toxic and dangerous conditions so we can regularly upgrade our smart phones.

What does it mean to observe Advent in the midst of all this suffering? Suffering that used to be hidden behind headlines, but is now livestreaming on social media? We can no longer pretend we live in a world where the tentacles of the U.S. military aren’t in every corner of the world, protecting U.S. “interests,” aka the world’s wealth of natural resources, at any cost. We can’t pretend everything is normal or OK.

I’m reminded of the Christ who was born into a world of upheaval, the Christ who would later toss tables in the temple when he encountered injustice. That is the tradition I want to be a part of. It’s the spirit with which I’m engaging with Advent this year.

The keffiyeh I used as a background in the photo at the top of the post is embellished with tatreez, a traditional Palestinian form of creative expression. It was stitched by Palestinians in a refugee camp in Jordan.

You can find Mosab Abu Toha on instagram. Other sources for news from within Gaza and the rest of the Middle East are @middleeasteye,@aljazeeraenglish, and @eye.on.palestine.