It isn't the jolliest of images, but come Christmastime I often think of my great-great-grandfather, Mika'il Dabdoub, docking in Victorian Manila in 1886 after arriving on a steamship from Singapore. He was 38 at the time, a year older than I am now, and had just traveled more than 5,000 miles from his hometown of Bethlehem, in the then-Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. To him, Manila might as well have been Mars.
He was joining his brothers, Gubra'il and Hanna, entrepreneurial craftsmen who were the first Bethlehemites in the Philippines. They had come a few years earlier in search of pinctada maxima oysters, which had thick, iridescent interiors that could be fashioned into intricate mother-of-pearl sculptures, inlays, and decorations, an artisanal specialty in Bethlehem since the early 18th century (brought by the Franciscan monks in the 15th century). The stuff—also called nacre—was mainly used for all things nativity-related: cameos, Bible covers, Stars of Bethlehem, nativity figures (especially Jesus and Mary), rosaries, boxes to store the rosaries, and almost anything even tangentially related to Jesus's birth.
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