Have you heard? Even Bethlehem has cancelled ‘Christmas’ this year! - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

HONG KONG – Those who are despondent that there seems to be no "Christmas cheer" this year in demonstration-torn and impeachment-focused Metro Manila can take heart from this "misery loves company" piece of news.

Don’t take my word for it. According to Hong Kong’s major English-language daily, South China Morning Post, in a dispatch datelined Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the same has happened in the Holy Land. The Post’s world page headlined: "Dispirited Bethlehem cancels Christmas."

The article read: "Were the three wise men to set off across the Middle East in pursuit of their star today – assuming they could distinguish it from Israeli military flares and satellites that hang in the sky – they would be in for a severe disappointment."

"They would arrive to find that, far from marking the 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s birth with celebrations, Bethlehem has cancelled Christmas," the story said. "After two months of violence, city officials have called off their plans for lavish millennium-year festivities, including more than a dozen concerts in Manger Square. The Christmas lights will not be switched on. At best, there will be modest services, mostly attended by the local Christian Arabs."

"The curtailment," the report pointed out, "was inevitable. In the past weeks, Israeli machinegun bullets and grenades have been pounding the buildings in the street opposite the presumed site of where the shepherds watched their flocks."

You bet. Peace on earth, good will towards men! Just as they did during the first Christmas, King Herod’s henchmen are afoot murdering the Holy Innocents, the little children. The trouble is that the hatred exists on both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nobody is innocent. All are at risk.

In our own country, hatred and anger seem to rule the land, too. There is no Christmas truce. No ceasefire. And our religious leaders are the ones whipping the people up into a frenzy. From the Little Town of Bethlehem to Ayala avenue and "Chino Roces" (Mendiola) bridge, can men still hark to hear the Herald Angels sing?

It’s not Good King Wenceslaus or the Three Kings we think about these December days, but King Erap besieged in his Palace by our religious Shepherds who’ve left their flocks to shift for themselves as they lead protesters to the barricades.

"May your hearts be merry and bright," the old carol sang. That, too, has been cancelled.

* * *

It has turned cold here in Hong Kong. Everyone is moving about in sober and heavy business suits, coats and sweaters. The shops teem with people. Christmas lights and decorations are everywhere, all the halls decked with holy in Central’s Landmark building and in Times Square in Causeway Bay. Hongkong harbor is bedecked with electronic Christmas displays. In Hong Kong? Most of the six million people here may not believe in Jesus Christ, but, hey, they believe that Christmas is the season to be jolly – and ring up the sales.

The town is packed. The hotels are full. There’s a mammoth ITU Telecom Asia 2000 convention going on, and two or three other conferences. Plus, of course, the usual horde of Christmas shoppers in from all over Asia. Hong Kong, although no longer as glamorous an entrepot port as it used to be under the British flag, retains its zing. Every type of cuisine is available, cooked in the usual delicious manner. There can, indeed, be no substitute in the whole wide world to rival a Cantonese chef (who gets an Admiral’s pay without having to run an entire Navy). The Cantonese may be noisy, raucous, loud and sometimes uncouth – but they cook up a dream!

Hong Kong has evidently stocked up for the Christmas shopping "rush." There are Santa Claus dolls ad nauseam, frosty snowmen, golden reindeer prancing. Even a golden ferris wheel in Causeway Bay. Winnie the Pooh "bear" is ubiquitous, attired in every color of the rainbow. There are Woody and Jesse dollars draped all over the landscape, followed by Buzz Lightyear the space-kid, and, of course, the perennial Hello Kitty (but the moms, yesterday’s child-worshippers of SanRio) are the ones who buy. Goods are everywhere in eye-hurting profusion.

Locally-based foreign businessmen, while gratified at the sudden flurry of activity, warn me, dourly, however, that all that glitter and gaiety are only a gay facade. Behind the bright lights and chirrupy crowds lurks the year-round spectre of Unemployment. Scrooge would have loved it here before his transformation.

But what the heck. It’s terrific to experience – even if just for a couple of days – that Christmassy feeling, even here among the jolly "unbelievers."

The thing that can be said about Hong Kong is that everybody works – and everything works. And to think that in the early 1950s, when we Filipinos were prosperous and sassy we used to "pity" the Hongkongers, with that city swamped with refugees from the 1949 takeover of China by the Communist People’s Liberation Army. Squattervilles and shanties were everywhere on the muddy hillsides, while hundreds of thousands of other displaced Chinese lived on squalid sampans and rotting Chinese junks.

If the Hongkongers, for all their sometimes obnoxious ways, are prosperous these days, they deserve it.

Their success reminds me of that line from the essayist Robert Louis Stevenson: "The hard way is the only enduring way."

That’s what they’ve done. They’ve endured. And we will, too – if we don’t lose heart.