In Beirut’s Achrafieh district, fairy lights still climb the balconies and a towering tree glows in Sassine Square. But this Christmas, the carols mingle with the distant echo of drones and the thud of cross‑border exchanges along Lebanon’s southern frontier with Israel. For many Lebanese, celebrating the holiday in 2025 means balancing cherished rituals with evacuation plans, economic hardship and the constant fear that a fragile calm could collapse into wider war.

Image Illustration. Photo by Hobi industri on Unsplash

A Holiday in a Country on Edge

Lebanon has lived for more than a year with intermittent clashes and airstrikes along its southern border, after hostilities escalated in October 2023 and then intensified again in late 2024 despite a formal ceasefire. Humanitarian agencies say the country has experienced its largest wave of internal displacement in decades, with around 1.2 million people forced from their homes in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa and the southern suburbs of Beirut, and thousands killed or injured in Israeli strikes, even after the November 27, 2024 truce. The United Nations has also reported continued civilian casualties since the ceasefire, underscoring how tentative the calm remains. A recent UN tally put civilian deaths from Israeli strikes in Lebanon at more than 120 in the year following the truce, with many more wounded and tens of thousands still unable to return home.

In this atmosphere, Christmas celebrations have taken on a defiant tone. Midnight Masses are still held in Beirut and in largely Christian towns in Mount Lebanon and the north. Yet in villages closer to the border, where churches have been damaged or emptied by displacement, services are reduced, relocated or livestreamed to families now living with relatives in safer areas or in crowded temporary shelters run by municipalities and aid groups.

Christians Celebrating as a Community Under Strain

Lebanon remains the Middle East country with the highest proportion of Christians, a community that has long played a central role in national politics and culture. Estimates vary, but recent demographic analyses suggest Christians make up roughly 30–33 percent of Lebanon’s citizen population, down from about half before the civil war, as decades of conflict and economic crisis have driven emigration. A major survey by the Beirut‑based firm Statistics Lebanon in 2022 put Christians at about 31.7 percent of Lebanese nationals, with Muslims at 68.3 percent, though the lack of a recent census means any figure is contested. That estimate has been widely cited in local media and policy debates as the most rigorous available snapshot of Lebanon’s confessional balance in years.

For many Christian families, this year’s Christmas is shadowed by the sense that their presence in Lebanon—and in the wider region—is under pressure. Pope Leo XIV, who visited Lebanon in late 2025, warned that Christian communities across the Middle East have shrunk dramatically because of war, sectarian violence and economic collapse. In Lebanon, Catholic Christians are now estimated to account for around a third of the population, down from a majority before the 1975–1990 civil war, according to church and diplomatic assessments referenced during the papal visit. Many parish priests in Beirut say they have watched their congregations shrink as young people leave for Canada, France or the Gulf.

Economic Collapse Changes How Lebanon Celebrates

Even far from the front lines, Lebanon’s prolonged economic crisis has transformed the way families mark the holidays. Since 2019, the country has endured one of the world’s worst financial collapses in more than a century, with the Lebanese pound losing over 90 percent of its value and inflation soaring into triple digits. The World Bank says poverty has more than tripled over the past decade, rising from 12 percent of the population in 2012 to 44 percent in 2022, based on surveys in five of Lebanon’s eight governorates—Akkar, Beirut, Beqaa, North Lebanon and most of Mount Lebanon. In some northern districts such as Akkar, local poverty rates have topped 60 percent, leaving many households unable to afford meat, heating fuel or private schooling.

By late 2023, Lebanon’s inflation rate was projected at more than 230 percent annually, and the country had the world’s steepest nominal food price increases, according to another World Bank assessment of the crisis. Many middle‑class families who once packed restaurants on Christmas Eve now hold smaller home gatherings, often relying on remittances sent by relatives abroad, which the Bank says have swelled to about 30 percent of Lebanon’s GDP. This year, the traditional Christmas table—roast turkey or stuffed lamb, mezze and rich desserts—is more likely to feature cheaper cuts of meat, or none at all, and homemade sweets bought cooperatively with neighbors.

The state’s inability to provide even basic electricity further shapes the holiday mood. For years, Lebanese have relied on private generators to fill the gaps left by the failing national grid. The problem worsened after border clashes and Israeli strikes damaged energy infrastructure and fuel storage. In April 2025, the World Bank approved a $250 million loan to help Lebanon stabilize its electricity sector as part of a broader reconstruction package estimated at roughly $1 billion, highlighting how war damage has compounded a pre‑existing crisis in power supply. For many households, that means the Christmas tree’s lights flicker on for only a few generator‑powered hours each evening, if at all.

Displaced Families Seek Refuge—and Normalcy

The war’s geography has reshaped Christmas too. Towns in southern Lebanon such as Rmeish, Alma al‑Shaab and Naqoura—where Christian and Muslim communities have long lived side by side—have seen waves of displacement since 2023. Some residents have returned between rounds of escalation to repair homes and reopen shops; others remain scattered in makeshift shelters, unfinished buildings or rented apartments in Tyre, Sidon and Beirut.

United Nations agencies say hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced across Lebanon because of continued Israeli strikes, occupation of pockets of Lebanese territory and the threat of unexploded ordnance. An October 2024 UN flash update estimated more than 600,000 internally displaced people linked to the cross‑border escalation, with around 180,000 sheltering in nearly 1,000 collective sites that were close to or beyond capacity. Aid workers say some southern parishes have organized toy drives and small Christmas events inside these shelters, hanging paper decorations on classroom walls and church banners over the doors of converted gyms.

Faith, Fear and a Fragile Ceasefire

The tension with Israel is never far from people’s minds. On Beirut’s seafront, where families stroll to see the capital’s main Christmas tree, conversation frequently turns from gift prices to the latest exchange of fire in the south, or rumors of new Israeli maneuvers across the Blue Line monitored by UN peacekeepers. Although a US‑brokered ceasefire in late 2024 reduced the pace of open clashes, Israeli surveillance flights and cross‑border attacks have continued, as have Hezbollah rocket and drone launches, keeping the prospect of a wider war alive.

Humanitarian organizations warn that Lebanon cannot withstand another major conflict layered onto its economic collapse and political paralysis. The Norwegian Refugee Council and other agencies describe the post‑ceasefire period as “a ceasefire in name only,” citing daily attacks, continued displacement and damage to homes, hospitals, schools and farmland in the south and Bekaa. For Christians and Muslims alike, that means every holiday, from Christmas to Ramadan and Easter, is planned with an eye on the news and an ear tuned to the skies.

Keeping the Lights of Christmas On

Yet amid crisis, many Lebanese insist on celebrating. In predominantly Christian neighborhoods of Beirut and the mountains, municipalities have scaled back but not abandoned their public decorations. Instead of elaborate imported displays, volunteers and local artists craft wooden nativity scenes and recycled‑material ornaments. Charity bazaars organized by parishes and NGOs raise money for families who can no longer buy toys or winter clothes for their children.

This quieter Christmas, marked by candlelight more than electric spectacle, speaks to a deeper Lebanese habit: asserting normalcy in defiance of war and collapse. For older generations who remember celebrating Christmas during the civil war and the 2006 conflict with Israel, today’s holiday is both painfully familiar and newly uncertain. For younger Lebanese, many of whom have known little but crisis, it is a chance—however brief—to reclaim a sense of community and joy.

Conclusion: Hope Between Sirens and Carols

As church bells ring out across Beirut and in pockets of the battered south, Lebanon’s Christmas is neither purely festive nor purely somber. It unfolds in the uneasy space between sirens and carols, where the glow of a modest tree can feel like an act of resistance. The country’s Christians, like their Muslim neighbors, are navigating overlapping crises of security, economy and governance that no holiday can resolve.

Still, for many Lebanese, the decision to gather, pray and exchange gifts—even modest ones—underlines a belief that life must go on, and that traditions rooted in family and faith can endure even under the shadow of war. This Christmas on the Mediterranean, hope is fragile. But in homes lit by generators and candles, it is not yet extinguished.