I had been hoping that the cachet of spending Christmas in Jerusalem would make up for the fact that I'd be alone on the holiday for the first time in my life, but in a city with a majority Jewish and Muslim population, December 25th is pretty much a day like any other. It was Christmas Eve, but there were no Santas, no nativity scenes, no decorated store windows, no trees festooned with multicolored lights, and no shoppers loaded down with last-minute gifts. After checking in, I wandered to my usual haunts in the Old City's Muslim Quarter there was no point in walking to predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem, as it was the Sabbath and the shops would be closed and the streets deserted.Īs I strolled around the city, I noticed that there were virtually no signs of Christmas anywhere. The hotel's peaceful vine-covered outdoor garden was a popular meeting spot for Palestinian academics and professionals, as well as expatriate westerners living in the West Bank. On days without political turmoil it was usually a short trip, about twenty-five minutes, and on this morning we sailed right through the Israeli military checkpoint without a problem.įor my lodgings I chose the Jerusalem Hotel, a lovely old stone building in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem, not far from the Damascus Gate entry into the walled Old City. I followed the cries of "Al Quds! Al Quds! Al Quds!" to a shared service taxi bound for Jerusalem. The air smelled of spices, and you could barely think with all the blaring horns and shouting. I walked to Ramallah's main square, the Manara, a bustling, raucous place filled with street vendors, shoppers and cars. On the morning of Christmas Eve, I packed a small bag and set out for Jerusalem.
After all, what could be more Christmassy than celebrating the birth of Jesus in the city most associated with his life? Remaining in my dreary Ramallah apartment over the Yuletide was out of the question, so I decided to stay at a hotel in Jerusalem for a few days over Christmas. If my complaint-filled letters home painted a picture of an unenviable life abroad, I was determined at least to make my upcoming holiday break the topic of animated Christmas dinner patter back in Chicago. In early December, I began to brood over the depressing prospect of spending Christmas alone.
Though cheerful and busy by day, Ramallah, the city where I lived, became a ghost town at nightfall, and through the long winter evenings I was confined to my damp, lonely hovel of an apartment, with no phone or television to distract me from the chores of lesson planning and paper grading.
In addition to having a full teaching load, I was struggling with the daily disruptions of life - roadblocks, curfews, strikes - in a society that was just beginning to emerge from its intifada, the Arabic word describing the uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. in linguistics, I had accepted a one-year position as a lecturer at Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution about twenty-five kilometers north of Jerusalem. My first and only holiday season spent away from Chicago was in 1994, when I was living and teaching in the West Bank.