Holiday of Holidays: The Festival Where Haifa Celebrates Everything

Most places in the Middle East celebrate their holidays separately and carefully. Haifa throws them all into one street party. Every December since 1993, the Holiday of Holidays festival - Chag HaChagim in Hebrew, Eid al-Aiad in Arabic - fills Wadi Nisnas and the German Colony for the weekends of the month, marking Hanukkah, Christmas and the Muslim calendar together, in the same alleys, at the same time.

It is not a staged tourist event. It grew out of the city itself. Haifa has been a genuinely mixed city for over a century - Jewish, Muslim, Christian Arab, Druze, Bahai, Ahmadi - living in overlapping neighborhoods rather than separate enclaves, working the same port and the same hospitals. The festival was started by a local cultural center as a deliberate statement that the three calendars could share one month, and Haifa took to it immediately.

What you actually see: Wadi Nisnas, the Arab Christian and Muslim neighborhood below the Carmel, hung with lights and decorations, its narrow lanes turned into an open-air gallery. The Museum Without Walls installations stay up year-round - sculptures and paintings mounted on building walls and in alleys - but in December the neighborhood adds craft stalls, choirs, jazz and Arabic music stages, children's theater, food stands selling knafeh, sahlab, sufganiyot and freshly griddled mana'eesh, and a genuinely enormous number of people. The German Colony boulevard carries the lights and the Christmas tree down to the sea, with Hanukkah menorahs in the same windows.

Go on a Saturday if you can - it is the biggest day, and it is also the day when the Jewish city is otherwise quiet and the Arab neighborhoods are wide awake, which tells you something about why Haifa works. Dress warmly, come hungry, and be ready for crowds and limited parking; the Carmelit subway and the trains are the sensible way in.

Even outside December, Wadi Nisnas is worth a morning for its market, its bakeries and its wall art, and the coexistence story is the thread running through our Cultural Mosaic of Haifa tour - which pairs the wadi with the Bahai Gardens, a Druze village and the German Colony. If you are in Israel in December, tell us and we will time your Haifa day around the festival. Contact us to plan it.