IRAQ: Christmas is not celebrated widely in Muslim-majority Iraq, but the country's small Chaldean Christian community has marked the occasion by decorating shops, offices, hotels and homes with trees, tinsel, lights, and bows of red ribbon.
Cosmopolitan Baghdad is not insular Saudi Riyadh, where overt manifestations of Christian worship are prohibited.
Christmas in Iraq does not begin in November as it does in Dublin, London or New York, but a week before the actual event.
The first evidence I saw that Christmas was coming was last week on a bridge across the Tigris river. The tops of two fir trees protruded from the boot of a taxi stalled next to my car in heavy traffic.
Evergreen trees laden with shimmering silver stars and glittering red, gold and green glass baubles are completely alien to Iraqi traditions thousands of years old, but Iraqis are, by and large, a modern-minded people.
Western fashions are accepted without comment even at a time when Iraqis are under serious challenge from the west.
Iraq, like Palestine at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ, is under the occupation of the western politico-military power of the day. Iraq's Herod-in-waiting is Dr Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shia Muslim with close connections to the Pentagon.
Iraqis say Dr Chalabi is more reviled than Saddam Hussein and many fear another slaughter of innocents is inevitable.
Decorations did not materialise until the 19th at my Christian-run hotel, the Orient Palace on the main street in the middle-class district of Karada.
The desk clerk began by wrapping a string of lights round the trunk of the short and stocky palm tree outside the front door. Palm trees all over the Arab world are dressed in this way for Muslim festivals.
Next, a living fir tree in a pot was installed in the lobby and three more were carefully positioned in corners of the dining room, festooned with concertinas of coloured tissue paper.
That evening Elia, the waiter, arranged bouquets of artificial flowers in brass vases while the pianist, who plays nightly from 8.30pm till 10pm, performed Christmas carols. The management's most gracious touch was in the kitchen where a plastic tree was erected for the cook as far from the range as possible.
Lights flicker off and on between government and generator-supplied current.
Baghdad's churches will be packed with families for Christmas Eve Mass in spite of insecurity and a lack of fuel and electricity. On Christmas Day many hotels and restaurants will lay on gala meals with all the trimmings and on New Year's Eve stage modest reveillions. Iraqis of all sects will join, seeking distraction from the grim daily round.
The bar in the Orient Palace is open nightly. Whiskey, beer and wine are duty-free. There are no tariffs in Iraq since the war. Anything goes because nothing is prohibited, given or certain.
It is the season to shut out the dull crump of bombs and sharp bursts of machinegun fire and remember the messenger of hope born 2,000-odd years ago in a manger in Bethlehem under a Roman occupation which, eventually, ended.