| Christmas is not celebrated in Cambodia except by the foreigners. This is quite difficult for some of them who have grown up with extensive Christmas festivities in their home countries and who now feel rather lost and lonely when such a treasured part of their culture is totally unknown and ignored. The Catholic celebration of the Advent season helps add a little more substance to the sense of Christmas in Cambodia. | |
| During the season of Advent, the children in the religious education program created symbols of the ancestors of Jesus mentioned in the Bible and hung them on a Jesse Tree each week. We rent a hall for our Saturday liturgies so each week the adults needed to set up the Jesse Tree again, with the previous weeks' symbols. |  |
| Students from the Salesian Sisters training school sold handicrafts they made to earn money for a trip to visit Angkor Wat, their iconic national symbol which they have never seen. |  |
| We try to demonstrate the intersection between our faith and the political realities of the world, and this year we set up an "alternative creche", a manger scene with a wall, representing the security wall that Israel has erected in Palestine which today would keep the magi from Bethlehem. |  |
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