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I wrote in a decades-old column that there was one family in our West End-Foggy Bottom neighborhood that never put up Christmas decorations or had a tree.

I didn’t know why. They lived in the back of their small grocery store at the corner of 23rd and L streets NW. All I knew was that the Colodnys were White people who never seemed to have the Christmas spirit.

Sometime later, I learned they were Jewish. Even if I had known back then, I’m not sure it would have meant anything, since my ethnic universe in the 1940s consisted of White and “Colored” people, neighborhood Chinese laundry workers, the accented Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho on radio, vanquished Japanese soldiers and Germans who were White, too, but because of World War II were in a class all to themselves. That was about it.

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The only thing I knew about Jews came from Sunday school. I think they were called Israelites. Jesus was one. That was my childhood worldview.

A baby lying in a manger in a town called Bethlehem was my vision. “O, Little Town of Bethlehem” was my song.

At Stevens Elementary School, where each day began with the recitation of Bible verses, and the Liberty Baptist Church’s Sunday school, the Christmas season heard us singing our little hearts out with: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” I didn’t quite know what that meant or where Israel was. But we had the Christmas spirit and a place in mind called the Holy Land.

Nothing in my childhood, or in ensuing Christmases, prepared me for this year.

Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem, the Palestinian town in which Jesus was born, have been canceled.

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The festive lights and the Christmas tree in Manger Square will be missing. So, too, crowds of visitors from around the world.

Bethlehem is in the shadow of war. Church leaders and the small congregations in the West Bank, where Bethlehem is located, will meet and pray at midnight. But there will be no marching bands or fireworks.

War, in the bloodiest and most destructive means possible, has descended. But its shadow has fallen not just over the Gaza Strip, which is home to more than 2 million Palestinians.

It’s a war that got started while Christians everywhere were preparing for Advent and the Incarnation.

The conflagration was touched off Oct. 7, when the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel, indiscriminatingly shooting, launching rockets, burning homes and committing unspeakable atrocities that left more than 1,200 dead, thousands wounded and savaged, and more than 200 hostages spirited to........

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