The Christmas trade is enormously important for the Norwegian trade, but in Palestine the “Christmas economy” is even more important. This week the Christmas tree in Bethlehem is lit for the first time since 2022.
“It’s December we live for the rest of the year,” a bookseller in Oslo once told me. perhaps he took it a bit too hard, but it is indeed undoubtedly true that the Christmas trade is hugely critically important for the Norwegian trade.
In this sense, they have something in common with Palestinian merchants. The difference is that the Palestinians profit from visitors,tourists and pilgrims,who come to experience Christmas in the country where the events of the Christmas Gospel took place.
“The Christmas economy had slowly recovered from the pandemic, and then it all collapsed again.”
The mayor of bethlehem, Maher Canawati, told me that 80-90 percent of the population was involved in Christmas tourism in one way or another, until the war broke out in 2023.
[Image of Ingrid Rosendorf Joys sits in the empty St.Catherine’s Church in Bethlehem. This church, which is connected to the Church of the Nativity through an underground passage, is usually full of pilgrims and other visitors at this time of year.Foto: Caritas Norway]
## Christmas is about more than money
Some people think that Christmas in Norway is too much about money and material things. Most people will still agree that Christmas is much more than pressure to buy and presents. For many Norwegians, the Christmas message is central, for many more, Christmas is about family, community, closeness and coziness. Christmas means a lot to many people, especially the little ones.
How would Norwegian children have reacted if they received the following brutal message: “This year we are canceling Christmas!”
The children in Bethlehem received that message. Not once, but both in 2023 and 2024. The decision was made by the churches, and the reason was that it was not felt to be right to celebrate christmas in the usual way, while the civilian population of Gaza was bombed and suffered from a lack of food, medicine and other necessities.
It was a strong symbolic act that attracted great attention worldwide. In this sense, it helped to shine an even stronger spotlight on the suffering in Gaza, but it came at a price for the population of the West Bank.
Partly financial, obviously. Christmas is hugely critically important in this respect, not only for Christian Palestinians, but also for their Muslim neighbors. The Christmas economy was badly hit initially, as a result of the war, but when the traditional christmas tree lighting and the stately Christmas celebration in the square in Bethlehem were cancelled, the “Christmas machinery” came to a complete halt. A spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism estimated that the war cost Bethlehem approx 10-15 million kroner per day.