Christmas Stars in Bethlehem; Tourism Follows Close Behind : Pennsylvania: City changes its traditions to conform with expectations as it looks for an industry to replace steel mills.

The darkened shells of the steelmaking factories stretch for miles along the Lehigh River, smokestacks rising like spires on these onetime cathedrals of a vibrant manufacturing age.

On one side of the river, the historic buildings of the city’s Moravian past are flanked by stylish shops and the prosperous homes of the men who ran Bethlehem Steel. In a mix of aesthetics, commerce and religion, only white Christmas lights are allowed on this side.

On the other side of the tracks that brought tons of iron ore into the city are the row houses, homes to generations of immigrants who spent their lives in steel mills now virtually shut down. Here, amid the taverns and churches, are elaborate Christmas decorations festooned with colored lights.

And shining brightly over both sides on a mountaintop, as it has for decades, is the Star of Bethlehem, lit up during the Advent season as a symbol of the coming of Christ.

But even before the last steelmaking plant shut down in November, this symbol of the community too, had changed. Last year, the star was lit year-round. The tourists, you see, expect it.

This Moravian outpost in the New World, founded in 1741, is now trying to sell itself as Christmas City, a must-stop spot for bus tours in the ‘90s.

Those who favor the selling of the city’s Christmas heritage say promoting tourism is one part of an economic package that has spared Bethlehem the devastation experienced by other steel towns.

But others fear the loss of something more, a sense of place that transcended the demands of the marketplace.

“If we try to sell Bethlehem as a religious city, it’s just not going to work,” said the Rev. Catherine Ziel, executive director of the Greater Bethlehem Area Council of Churches. “We lose our uniqueness, and it’s that uniqueness we have to sell.”

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The story every local schoolchild is told of the founding of Bethlehem begins on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1741. Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a nobleman who was a patron of the Moravians in Europe, led a service in the first house built at the settlement. As the story has been handed down, von Zinzendorf was inspired to go next door to a stable reminiscent of the biblical scene of Christ’s birth.

There, they sang Christmas hymns, including one German hymn extolling Christ’s birth not in Jerusalem, but in “lowly Bethlehem.” Hence, the town was christened Bethlehem.

Even as recently as two generations ago, Christmas was still a relatively simple affair here.

Long before bitter strikes and union organizing efforts provided relatively high pay for steelworkers were the days through the 1930s when immigrants were crammed into apartments, men sometimes sharing beds on alternate 12-hour shifts. Steelworkers would earn a dime an hour for long days in mills filled with smoke and dust but no heat.

Christmas pleasures were found in simple activities--midnight Mass, caroling throughout the neighborhood and in various ethnic traditions. In the Slovak neighborhoods, for example, straw would be placed under the table for the Christ child.

The years strip away from grandmother Anne Horwath’s face as she recalls how, as a timid young girl, she would crawl under the kitchen table and fall asleep on the straw.

“You were the Christ child,” said Margaret Baranyay, lost in the same image, as she smiled at her older sister in the basement of St. Anne’s Catholic Church.

The gifts they and their friends usually received back then were new clothes for Christmas services.

In Jewish homes, older synagogue members at Congregation Brith Sholom recall, no gifts were given at Hanukkah. But there was nothing to be jealous about, because the Christian children weren’t getting anything either.

With the prosperity of the steel mills after World War II came more commercial Christmases. All of a sudden, presents were piled high under trees, and many of the earlier immigrants moved to the north side.

Bethlehem still has remarkable ties to the religious bond of that first Christmas, even though Moravians, who controlled all land into the 1840s, now make up less than 1% of the population.

In many ways, visiting Bethlehem is like taking a walk back in time to the days before legal challenges over the enforcement of the separation between church and state stripped many public squares of any religious symbolism.

Kids still sing Christmas hymns in school. On a municipal square between City Hall and the library is a large creche. A live Christmas pageant complete with animals, in which all residents are invited to participate, is an annual tradition in the historic district.

“Bethlehem kind of lives on the religious side of the tension, not the secular side,” said the Rev. Gareth Icenogle, co-pastor of First Presbyterian Church.

In the dining room at Iacocca Hall at Lehigh University, with its panoramic view of Bethlehem, hundreds of people gather for the Advent Community Breakfast. The main speaker issues a familiar litany: Giving and receiving presents is nice, but beware “the commercialization of Christmas.”

What is unusual is that he delivers the sermon dressed as jolly old St. Nick.

You need look no further than those conflicting images to grasp the odd partnership business and religion have formed to sell Bethlehem as a tourist destination.

Two years ago, the Chamber of Commerce became a co-sponsor of the breakfast, which was started by the Council of Churches in the 1940s as a religious kickoff to the Advent season. The chamber also formed a Citizens’ Christmas City Committee, which distributed flyers at the breakfast encouraging people to put white candles in their windows.

The chamber’s purpose: a commercially attractive downtown. But its pitch to residents is to display a sign of welcome to the Christ child.

So far, business has been good. The city expects 100,000 visitors this holiday season, including some 400 tourist buses. It’s hard to move in the Moravian Book Shop on a Saturday afternoon in the shopping season. And lines form in restaurants along Main Street much of the day.

But one price of success has been a loss of some of the traditions that made Bethlehem a true Christmas city for residents.

Falling by the commercial wayside, along with the lighting of the star only during Advent, was the practice of waiting for the start of the Christian year for the annual lighting of city streets and trees.

This year, Advent did not begin until Dec. 3, nine shopping days past Thanksgiving. But if out-of-town tour buses couldn’t see the Christmas lights--about 70,000, nearly matching the population--many would turn around and go home, civic leaders feared. So the lights were turned on the day after Thanksgiving.

In creating their own traditions to drum up business, tourism officials have tried to include religion in the mix.

Begun in 1993, Christkindlmarkt is basically a large craft fair with Santa Claus on one end and a display of creches on the other. In the bigger-is-better commercial tradition, a key selling point this year is a 40-ton sand sculpture of the Nativity scene.

Jeffrey Parks, one of the city’s leading tourism officials as president of the Bethlehem Musikfest Assn., noted that an effort has been made to respect religious customs. The city is “not selling Santa Claus,” he said, “and we’ve no desire to do that.”

What the business community realizes, he said, is that what Bethlehem has to offer tourists is “a really religiously based experience. And it’s not fake. And it’s not one we’ve created for them.”

Some religious leaders agree that city officials have shown restraint in marketing Christmas in Bethlehem.

Even Rabbi Allen Juda, comparing the city “to the other Bethlehem, as we put it here,” said the eastern Pennsylvania community has been relatively restrained compared to the huge number of shops at what is believed to the historic site of Jesus’ birth.

“When I came here, what struck me was how understated Christmas was for the Christmas city,” said Juda, who has been at Brith Sholom for 20 years. “It was fascinating to me that the community here--the national Christmas City--had not done much more.”

But many see a growing gap between the business and religious communities.

“The star is about Advent and the coming of the Christ child,” said 76-year-old James McKee during an Advent gathering at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on the South Side. “I’m afraid now it’s a magnet for the retail trade.”

Over at Second Baptist Church, the Rev. Edward Thompson grabbed the pulpit with both hands and looked directly down at his congregation to exhort them to remember “the reason for the season.”

In an interview, Thompson said the city is trying “to make it Xmas instead of Christmas. They will start earlier and earlier and stretch it out further and further until it comes to a point where they won’t think of Bethlehem as a Christmas city.”

“What would God say about Christmas in Bethlehem today?” sixth graders at the Moravian Academy were asked.

“I don’t think he would be very pleased,” said Adam Mattina. “They’re kind of sucking the life and religion out of Christmas.”

Added Josh Roberts: “I think he would just say, ‘What the heck happened down here?’ ”

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And yet, there is something special about Christmas in Bethlehem that the forces of tourism have not touched.

There are events such as Advent Lovefeasts, where visitors to Moravian churches are given coffee and sugar buns during a hymn service. And there are simple tellings of the Christmas story at putzes, traditional handmade depictions of the events two millenia ago.

Even with the loss of some 30,000 steel jobs since the ‘60s, the feeling still crosses over to unite both sides of town.

The special meaning of a Bethlehem Christmas is felt at First Presbyterian Church, where a long driveway leads to the mansion-like grounds of the elite congregation.

And it is present at the soup kitchen at Grace Episcopal Church, where scores of people, many of them ex-steelworkers, will spend their Christmas.

“I don’t think the spirit of Christmas is ever going to away, no matter how bad it gets,” said volunteer Eddie Micek, who helped build one of the mills and is now receiving disability benefits. “The spirit is still here. The lights are still up.”