Doug Specht considers how for some around the world, Christmas is less of a celebration and more of a test of endurance
December implies a rhythm: a global synchronisation of light, commerce, and pause. Yet, as 2025 draws to a close, this seasonal rhythm creates a jarring dissonance against the backdrop of a world at war.
While the festive season is marketed as a universal experience of homecoming and abundance, for the 122 million people currently forcibly displaced, the calendar offers no truce. The holiday has ceased to be a time of gathering and has instead become a marker of exile, a period where the contrast between the global narrative of ‘peace on earth’ and the local reality of survival is most violently acute. For many, Christmas is not experienced as a celebration, but as a test of endurance.
The silenced manger: Bethlehem’s fragile return
Nowhere is the dissonance between the global myth and the local reality more acute than in the birthplace of the holiday itself. In December 2025, Bethlehem is attempting a fragile return to celebration after two years of total silence. In 2023 and 2024, the municipality cancelled all public festivities in solidarity with Gaza, leaving Manger Square dark and the 50-foot tree unlit. This year, the lights are back on, but the city they illuminate has been fundamentally hollowed out.
‘The message of Bethlehem is always peace,’ says Mayor Maher Canawati, who oversaw the lighting ceremony on 6 December. But the peace is performative. The reality on the ground is an economic catastrophe. Tourism, which typically accounts for 70 per cent of the city’s income, has yet to recover, leaving unemployment hovering near 65 per cent. The occupation has tightened around the city; checkpoints have multiplied, and the separation wall remains a concrete horizon that severs the town from its twin city, Jerusalem.
For the local Christian community, now a shrinking demographic, any hint of festivity is an act of defiant survival. Shops that can afford to open arrange small displays of olive wood nativities and crosses at their doors. In Bethlehem, the carol ‘O Little Town’ rings hollow against silent, half-lit streets and shuttered storefronts, where the ‘hopes and fears of all the years’ have decidedly tipped toward the latter.
The weaponisation of winter: Ukraine’s subterranean season
Two thousand miles north, the holiday has been recruited into a different kind of war. December 2025 marks the third year that Ukraine has officially celebrated Christmas on December 25, a legislative divorce from the Russian Orthodox tradition of celebrating Christmas on 7 January, enacted in July 2023. This shift was a geopolitical manoeuvre, a declaration that Ukraine’s spiritual clock is aligned with Europe, not Moscow.
But this alignment has come at a cost. Winter in Ukraine is no longer just a season; it is a weapon. Following the devastation of the energy grid in late 2024 and throughout 2025, the ‘warmth’ of Christmas is a literal matter of survival. With temperatures dropping to -20°C, the holiday is celebrated in the dark. In Kyiv, half the capital experiences rolling blackouts, turning the ‘Festival of Lights’ into a festival of endurance.
The trauma of last year is still fresh. On 25 December, 2024, Russia launched a massive barrage of 184 missiles and drones, specifically targeting the energy infrastructure that keeps the country alive. It was a calculated psychological strike, designed to break the festive spirit along with the power lines.
The result is the emergence of a subterranean Christmas. The locus of the holiday has shifted from the cathedral to the metro station and the bomb shelter. Families gather underground, wrapping gifts by battery light, their breath visible in the damp air. In the bunkers of Kharkiv, the carols are sung quietly, competing with the air raid sirens above, a sonic landscape that defines the new Ukrainian Christmas.
The hidden feast: Myanmar’s jungle sanctuaries
While Bethlehem and Ukraine struggle to maintain visibility, the Christians of Myanmar are fighting to remain invisible. Since the 2021 coup, the military junta has waged a brutal campaign against the Christian minority, particularly in states like Kayah and Shan. By late 2025, the persecution has evolved into a systematic attempt to erase religious identity.
In December 2024, the military launched 120mm mortar shells into Christian villages during festive gatherings, killing civilians and forcing thousands to flee. This year, the lesson has been learned: Christmas must leave the village.
Entire congregations now trek into the jungle to celebrate. This is a Christmas of absolute stealth. There are no lights, which would attract strikes. There is no amplified music. The liturgy is whispered under the canopy of the forest, where the ‘cathedral’ is defined only by the safety of the trees.
Displaced villagers, carrying the few possessions they could save, recreate the nativity in its most literal sense: a vulnerable family, displaced by state violence, seeking sanctuary in the wild.
Christmas at war
To look at these regions is to witness the dismantling of the holiday’s traditional architecture. The public square, the cathedral, and the family table have been replaced by the checkpoint, the basement, and the jungle camp.
These ‘forgotten Christmases’ challenge the comfort of the season, reminding us that the nativity narrative itself, a story of a family displaced by state violence, seeking inadequate shelter, is currently being reenacted by millions.
In 2025, the most authentic observance of the holiday is not found in the illuminated capitals of the West, but in these spaces of shadow, where the feast is kept alive through a deep, quiet refusal to disappear.
