PICTURESQUE SCENE

Hokitika Guardian, 27 December 1928, Page 5

PICTURESQUE SCENE

AT CHURCH OF NATIVITY

(United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyr.glit).

JERUSALEM. Dec. 25

Tourist and Christian pilgrims from as far afield as China and Japan, joined to-day in a picturesque ceremonial around the grotto, which, according to tradition, served as a stable for the village lioetcl, where the Saviour was born 1928 years ago. The praces.si "as headed by a Latin Patriarch and an escort of Palestine mounted police, and was composed of hundreds of clergy, natives in brightly coloured robes. It was formed at mid-day in Jerusalem and proceeded from the Jaffa Gate to Bethlehem. Well-dressed and well-to-do Europeans accompanied the throng, some as onlookers, some as devout worshippers at this annual glorification of the birth of Christ.

r l'he weather was more like an English spring day than the December ni the Christmas card artists. The sky was cloudless and the sun glinted on the jewels in the Patriarch’s mitre and accoutrements of tho guards. The ground was ablaze with a huge silver star and hundreds of twinkling candles around the idle of the manger, now marked by a marble monument built over the grotto in the Churli of the -Nativity. Into and around this moved the throng. ’Pile observance continued until mid night, when the worshippers reassembled in the Church of Saint Catherine, adjoining tile Basilica, and formed a procession to tho Grotto, whore ail imago of the Infant Saviour was laid in tho place of the manger, where it is kept until Epiphany-. Protestants commenced observance of the holiest days in Christendom by a watch in the bright moonlight in the shepherds’ field, situated on the east road in Bethlehem. They spent the night under the courtyard adjoining tile- Grotto.