Originally published 2018-12-29.
In late December 2018, hundreds of people gathered in Aleppo's Al-Aziziyah district to watch a Christmas tree being lit. A children's choir in red capes and Santa hats sang, families took photos, and fireworks went up over a city where, two years earlier, the night sky had been lit by shelling and tracer fire. The pictures and videos below, filmed by the video agency Ruptly and shared on social media on Christmas Eve, record that evening.
For many residents it was the first Christmas season that began to feel like the ones they remembered from before the war. That makes the footage moving, but it also needs context: who lives in Aleppo, what happened to the city between 2012 and 2016, and what changed again in the years that followed.
What happened in Al-Aziziyah in December 2018
The celebration centred on a large decorated tree in Al-Aziziyah, a neighbourhood known for its late Ottoman and early twentieth-century architecture and long home to many of the city's Christian families and shops. Crowds filled the square for the lighting, children performed in red costumes, and a fireworks display followed.
The timing carried extra weight. The battle for Aleppo had ended on 22 December 2016, just days before Christmas, so in the city the holiday has become tied up with memories of the fighting's end. Supporters of the Syrian government marked the anniversary as a victory, while many people from the formerly opposition-held east of the city remember the same weeks as a time of siege and forced departure.
Seen from above, the crowd packs the street around the blue-lit tree, under strings of star-shaped lights and a "2019" sign looking ahead to the new year. During the years when the city was divided by front lines, a gathering this size in the open would have been unthinkable.
The tree itself, covered in blue and white lights and topped with a gold star. Power cuts were part of daily life in Aleppo for years, so a brightly lit public space carried a meaning beyond simple decoration.
The "2019" lettering and shooting-star decorations hung across the building facades behind the tree, turning the whole square into a stage for the evening.
Aleppo's Christians before the war
Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, settled for roughly seven thousand years, and before 2011 it was Syria's largest city with around 2.5 million people. It also had one of the most important Christian communities in the region: slightly more than 250,000 people, about 12 percent of the population, which was widely described as the third-largest Christian population in the Middle East after Cairo and Beirut.
That community was remarkably varied. It included Armenian Apostolic and Syriac Orthodox churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church of Antioch, and Eastern Catholic communities such as Melkites, Maronites, Chaldeans and Syriac Catholics, alongside Latin Catholics. The Christian quarter of Al-Jdayde dates back to the fifteenth century, and the city's churches, schools and Christmas markets were a familiar part of its life.
A children's choir in red capes and Santa hats sang for the crowd. Families who stayed through the war often describe giving children ordinary holidays as one of the most important things they could do.
Four and a half years of fighting
Rebel fighters entered Aleppo in July 2012, and the city was soon split: government forces held the west, while a range of opposition and militant groups held the east. Kurdish YPG forces controlled the northern Sheikh Maqsoud area. The Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was badly damaged, with tens of thousands of buildings damaged or destroyed, including parts of the Umayyad Mosque.
In late 2016 government forces and their allies retook the east. Between mid-November and 22 December, large numbers of civilians fled toward government-held districts, and the Red Cross said around 34,000 people, including fighters, were evacuated to Idlib. Monitoring groups documented more than 20,000 civilian deaths in Aleppo province over the course of the war, numbers they themselves describe as likely undercounts.
Christians in the city largely tried to stay neutral early on, though many came to back the army as the war went on. By early 2017 the Christian population had fallen below 100,000, with many families emigrating for good.
Residents fill the street in front of the tree, many filming on their phones. Al-Aziziyah's mix of churches, cafés and shops made it a natural place for a public celebration.
The finale: fireworks cascade down the length of the tree. The contrast with wartime nights is a big part of why these images travelled so widely on social media.
One evening, many perspectives
Coverage at the time often used the word "liberation" for the end of the battle. That is the language of the Syrian government and its allies, and it is not neutral: for residents of the eastern districts, December 2016 meant bombardment, displacement and the loss of homes. Both experiences are real, and a celebration in one neighbourhood does not erase the other.
It is equally true that a public Christmas in 2018 did not mean recovery was complete. Electricity, jobs and housing remained serious problems, sanctions and economic collapse hit families hard, and much of the Old City was still in ruins. The footage shows a community choosing to celebrate anyway, which is exactly why it resonated.
Christmas in #Aleppo #Siria #Syria 💙 pic.twitter.com/mPU8AGkuib
— Gabriel Garroum Pla (@GabrielGarroum) December 24, 2018
بالفيديو والصور ـ أجواء #عيد_الميلاد في مدينة #حلب https://t.co/zGjcZZmCKq#ميلاد_مجيد#Aleppo#Christmas #ChristmasEve pic.twitter.com/Z00IAJd3cs
— nbnlebanon (@nbntweets) December 24, 2018
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
Christmas in Aleppo after Assad
The political picture changed completely six years later. Opposition forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham captured Aleppo on 29 November 2024, and Bashar al-Assad's government fell in early December, shortly before Christmas.
That Christmas, Fr Bahjat Karakach, parish priest of the Church of St Francis of Assisi in Aleppo, told AsiaNews that churches were packed as in other years and that no incidents were recorded in the city. Security forces guarded Christian neighbourhoods, though Mass times were moved earlier so people could get home before dark. The new authorities kept 25 December as a national holiday. Elsewhere in Syria the season was tenser: a Christmas tree was set on fire in Skelbiye, and Christians protested in Damascus.
Why these images still matter
Pictures like these are a small record of how people rebuild ordinary life after a war: a tree, a song, a crowd in a square. They do not settle arguments about the conflict, and they should not be asked to. What they do show is that Aleppo's Christian community, smaller than before but still present, kept its traditions alive in one of the most damaged cities of the century.
Photographs: Ruptly.
Sources: Wikipedia: Aleppo; Wikipedia: Battle of Aleppo (2012–2016); AsiaNews, December 2024: Aleppo parish priest on a Christmas of hope. Photos and video by Ruptly; social posts by Gabriel Garroum Pla and NBN Lebanon.
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