For those who have ever seen a school Nativity Play, it’s not too difficult to imagine. Small children wearing teatowels, intended to make them look Middle Eastern, are Joseph, shepherds or the inn-keeper. One of the shepherds picks his nose, while another wriggles about and whispers loudly that he needs to go to the toilet. A little girl with a big blue veil, clutching a doll is Mary. She looks very smug because she got the best role, after the doll. One of the angels gets stage fright and bursts into tears. The ox and ass start pushing each other and this develops into a fight.

In a strange reversal of roles, a priest has decided to replace the Christmas crib scene in his church with a replica of Israel’s anti-terror ‘wall’.

Each year hundreds of people come to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in St. Ives in Cambridgeshire to see the live sheep, a cow and donkey, and actors who occasionally have brought their newborn babies to play the role of Jesus for the Nativity scene.

But this year visitors will be staring up at an imposing gray replica of a portion of the wall built by the Israeli government in 2002 to keep Palestinian suicide bombers at bay.

Fr Paul Maddison “wants to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people suffering as a result of the wall.” He doesn’t want to celebrate all the Jewish lives saved by the same ‘wall’, evidently.

Meanwhile, Hamas vows to dress up Jesus’ birthplace.

It needs it. So many Christians have been driven out by Muslim persecution, there’s hardly anyone left to decorate the place.

A few neon stars are nailed to storefronts on the main streets. The only decoration on the Lutheran Christmas Church in a busy market area is spraypainted graffiti below the pointed steeple that reads “Islamic Jihad” — a Muslim militant group.

Perhaps Hamas are hoping to put on an exciting firework display, using some of their stock of explosives. They might add to the noise of celebration by firing their guns a lot – either into the air, or into members of Fatah.

I am really hoping they will put on a Nativity tableau, though. The shepherds won’t need to wear tea towels, already possessing the correct headwear. I can just see this lady pretending to be Mary, and holding this baby.

How sweet. And if a fight breaks out between the terrorists dressed as the ox and the ass, that should be more interesting than usual.