Christmas

Something has to be done, when the weeks leading up to Christmas are rain-sodden, perturbed and creaky with tiredness, and when the office Secret Santa holds sway every day for two weeks and vast amounts of chocolate and kneffe sandwiches are consumed for breakfast every morning to stave off the boredom. Something has to be done, and we do our best. We go to the German Orient Institute and drink mulled wine in a graceful courtyard with a many-sided fountain next to the library, all golden light and inlaid wood and fraying cloth-bound volumes. We go to Franco-German Jazz at the American University of Beirut chapel, where a thin man in a poppy-printed shirt introduces a small fat one in a grey t-shirt whose glorious beatboxing has people jiggling in their pews by the organ, and to classical Koranic music sung in a Maronite church with Mamluk mouldings in Gemmayzeh. Here an old man in robes, his face lined like the pages of a book, spins chants that when you close your eyes to the kitsch and the chandeliers makes you think instead of tents in the desert and Mohammed at dawn, communing with his god in the quiet. We go to the Old Souk in Kaslik for the food and wine festival, and do our dégustation in honey-coloured halls, beneath multicoloured lamps, and on the terrace overlooking Jounieh bay, while a man who glories in the career title of pizza acrobat spins his dough in ever-widening circles and the crowd goes oooh. But we come home early, because tomorrow is Saturday and we must sleep before work, and our feet drag. Something has to be done.

And so, we do it. The Sunday before Christmas we haul ourselves up at the crack of dawn and head for the Bekaa valley. The way to Syria, the way to the Roman temples, the way to the fertile lands and vineyards, the way to mountains and mists and snow and the breath of the new.

So many stories pave the road to the Bekaa, and here we are taking a tour bus to the vineyards. But it is the season, and in the spirit of Lebanon, to forget the trails of blood and war and ideology and to go pleasure-seeking instead. In the early white-cloud hours we are scarves and hats and arms around each others’ shoulders – and when we look back north towards Mount Lebanon our hearts lift at last with winter and adventure, for it is vast and unearthly icing-sugar white, the first snow of the year.

Up bare and stony hills the bus climbs, past as much ugliness and emptiness borne of destruction and poverty as we have seen before. Past half-built apartment blocks with child-sized pink mosquito nets set up bravely and significantly next to nonexistent walls, past bridges still under construction after Israeli bombing in 2006, with signs next to them that read, with jaw-dropping insouciance, Bridge reconstruction project: From the American people, for Lebanon’s progress. Past mangy dogs scavenging at the roadside, and a seasonal rash of men dressed as Santa selling bags of pink candyfloss outside barely-identifiable grocery shacks.

Edging round mountain corners above lumps of rock and frozen streams, the valley creeps into view. The hillsides are just as bare, deforested, but dignified – not scattered with ugly buildings but merely with grudging grey stones and occasional dark fuzzes of hard-bitten trees. The line of sky beneath the clouds and above the mountains is yellow and grey; the vast flat floor of the valley is rumpled at the edges by great ribs of rock and earth, driving plow-shaped into the land. Beyond them the hills rise higher and higher, shrugging into themselves in the cold, lavender and steel blue and greenish grey, blanketed in the distance with early snows. Mist is pulled along the valley floor like a ghostly scarf, that settles only uncertainly and barely warms the bony limbs it drapes.

On the flat between the ribs, with its dark clumps of trees and grey fields and heartbreaking plastic tents cobbled together by Syrian migrants, we are soon full of Arab bread with labneh or kariche and honey. We reel from vineyard to vineyard – Ksara, Kefraya, Kouroum, Clos de St Thomas – and our heads are full of Roman passageways and shining steel stills and signs that read dégustation or fermentation in stencilled white letters on black boards, halls full of stopped-up barrels stained pink and smelling of honey and oak. Piles of corks, winter-stubby vines in neat lines between dark firs with the snow far away in the blue, the sky changing above the mountains every hour, and always, always the wine, honey or pepper or summer fruits or who really cares, when you are warm and tired and settling down to a late lunch at the last cave, sitting à l’Arabe on bright low seats with a few full bottles and piles of cheese and bread and sausage tasting of anis.

In eight hours, we have visited four vineyards. Our lungs are full of fresh Bekaa air and our mouths with sweet scents. Something had to be done, and we did it well. As we slumber back to Beyrouth, the skies over the hills welcome us in pink and grey, sunlit patterns of cloud and mist and the dark silhouettes of trees standing lonely by the roadside. Soon, it will be Christmas.

Christmas Eve, and the mildly inebriated day spent watching Tom & Jerry in the office in protest at the 3pm end time (because you have Saturday off) and the macabre office “party” with self-congratulatory management speeches, lorded over by the obese eight-year-old heir apparent to the company, is quickly and thankfully forgotten. For now, we will come from Zouk, from Hamra, from Sodeco, from Dahiye, to Bourj Hammoud for a night among the lamps and the spices and the sweetness in the dark.

Fatima and I walk from Dora, along my favourite streets. They are as obstreperous as ever in the lamplight, except that everyone is wearing Santa cowboy hats. We turn off the main road and walk through hazes of nargileh smoke, the steam from roasting chickens, the scent drifting from herbs hanging in armfuls above magical mounds of polished fruit and vegetables. A battered estate car stands idle, full from roof to window, from boot to front seat with enormous white pumpkins. The sweet shops spill out on to the road, cardboard boxes full of coated peanuts, walnuts, dried fruits, things in toffee, sweets in twists of paper and sweets in boxes, scoops shoved in at the ready for filling greedy paper bags.

Onno brings out the best in everyone. Hummus haar, we say, and zeitoun haar, and tabbouleh haar the Armenian way, because khalas with the mild Lebanese everyday. Red wine, we say, and we talk about Lebanon and Iraqi refugees and our dreams and mop up oil with Arab bread, until the others fall in the door. Cherry kebabs, we say, and batatas al toom. Sausages with cloves, soujouk in yoghurt, fattouch, chicken livers. Sparrows, I insist, not without trepidation. Ruba catches on – frogs, she says, and announces a CDBB party – Cute Dead Baby Birds. The tiny once-feathery corpses disappear, bones and skulls and all, juicy mouthfuls soaked in wine-rich sauce. The frogs have no power to unnerve beneath their herbs and juices, and the small creatures make a happy communion in our bellies.

Under a self-consciously cheese-like horizontal half moon, we find our way to red wine and almaza in Gemmayzeh. We are tired, still, but tomorrow will dawn bright and sunny and there will be nothing but pyjamas and lazy dozes and thoughtless yawns in front of The Snowman and Father Christmas and Brideshead Revisited. We laugh until our throats are sore in the smoky bar, and as we waver home in the dark, we know that we will sleep dreamlessly, and well.