I remember the conversation I had with my late uncle, Felix Mgbo. This was a few years after I left my home country, Nigeria, for Rome. Uncle Felix asked me: “Are you coming home for Christmas?”
“No, Uncle Felix, not this time,” I replied, sounding rather flat.
“Do you realize,” he said, his voice suddenly heavy with emotion, “that you have not been to your maternal home for Christmas since you left the country?”
“Yes,” I replied, “but you know it is not possible for me to leave my people here in Italy during this great celebration.”
“So you prefer them to us, and they are now your people?” he wondered aloud. “We miss you so much, and I am not sure if they celebrate Christmas in Italy the way we do here. I hear it is so cold where you are spending Christmas in Northern Italy that people celebrate Christmas indoors….”
He went on and on, trying to convince me that I needed to come home for Christmas—especially that year, when my late father was celebrating his first Ofala as the traditional monarch, one of the biggest cultural feasts in my community.
The end of the year is usually a time when many family members and friends from Africa make strong appeals to those of us who live and work in North America and Europe to come home for Christmas. This is because Christmas in Nigeria is a homecoming. Christmas in Nigeria, and in many African communities, is the biggest celebration of the year. It is a time of reunion for families, towns, and clans. Cities empty out as people return to their ancestral homes or places of birth to celebrate with family. Christmas in Africa is a time when every child must get a new dress. “Christmas dress” has become a metaphor in Nigeria for a new outfit—so when you dress very well, people say, “You must be wearing your Christmas dress.”
What makes Christmas in Nigeria particularly striking is that it is a celebration for everyone—Christians, Muslims, and practitioners of African Traditional Religions—no one is excluded. Christmas is, for our people, a social sacrament of belonging.”
What makes Christmas in Nigeria particularly striking is that it is a celebration for everyone—Christians, Muslims, and practitioners of African Traditional Religions—no one is excluded. Christmas is, for our people, a social sacrament of belonging. It is a time for reconciliation within families, a moment to take stock of the past year, especially the spiritual and moral lives of individuals, families, and communities. Priests sit in confessionals for hours in the final week before Christmas, listening to the unending lines of penitents seeking forgiveness, healing, and a fresh beginning.
Christmas is also a time when communities plan development initiatives, reflect on communal challenges, and renew commitments to shared responsibility. Families organize prayer gatherings, Christmas “crusades,” prayer vigils, reconciliation meetings, special intercessory prayers, and festive parish Masses. It is also during this season that people pay condolence visits to families who have lost loved ones during the year and bring gifts to babies born in the past twelve months. Christmas becomes a bridge between grief and hope, loss and life.
The mutual exchange of gifts and visits remains central. Children go door to door receiving gifts and money, which they proudly bring home to their parents. Parishes often receive more offertory at Christmas than during the rest of the year combined. In Eastern Nigeria, Christmas is also the season of masquerades and traditional dancing troupes, performing in public squares and street corners, showcasing ancestral creativity and communal joy. Christmas in Africa is a weeklong—sometimes month-long—celebration: a carnival of faith, culture, friendship, sports, family, and community.
The high point is the Christmas Midnight Mass—often followed by fireworks and traditional gun salutes welcoming the Christ Child. Families then return home for the Christmas banquet. Large extended families may slaughter a cow; smaller households prepare goat, ram, turkey, or chicken. The Christmas table is rich. I have never known anyone in my community to go hungry on Christmas Day. Even the poor are welcomed by neighbors and relatives. Christmas is a season of open doors—no appointments needed. Everyone belongs.
Obviously, Christmas is a Christian celebration with roots in the West, but it has been embraced fully and creatively by Africans. God leaves footprints in the sands of history, revealing how the Gospel takes flesh in new cultures. Christmas in Africa bears unmistakably African features—communal, generous, embodied, noisy, joyful, and reconciliatory.
This year, however, I cannot write about Christmas in Africa without a heavy heart.
I wonder how Christmas will be celebrated by families fleeing war in Sudan, by communities living under the shadow of violence in the Sahel, by villages emptied by banditry and kidnapping in Nigeria, by survivors of massacres and sexual violence in eastern Congo, by children growing up amid extremism and terror in parts of Somalia, Mozambique, and the Lake Chad Basin.”
I wonder how Christmas will be celebrated by families fleeing war in Sudan, by communities living under the shadow of violence in the Sahel, by villages emptied by banditry and kidnapping in Nigeria, by survivors of massacres and sexual violence in Eastern Congo, and by children growing up amid extremism and terror in parts of Somalia, Mozambique, and the Lake Chad Basin. I wonder how Christmas will be celebrated by refugees in camps across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Chad, and Niger; by internally displaced families sleeping in churches, schools, and makeshift shelters; by mothers who no longer know where their sons are; and by fathers who can no longer protect their families.
In many places across Africa today, Christmas arrives not with fireworks but with fear; not with open doors but with guarded silences; not with full tables but with empty hands, empty stomachs, and empty hearts… The Church herself in Nigeria this year will celebrate Christmas amid mourning.”
In many places across Africa today, Christmas arrives not with fireworks but with fear; not with open doors but with guarded silences; not with full tables but with empty hands, empty stomachs, and empty hearts. Extremism, political violence, ethnic hatred, climate disasters, and economic despair have wounded the African family and torn at the fragile fabric of communal life. The Church in Nigeria this year will celebrate Christmas amid mourning—burying catechists, priests, religious men and women, and lay leaders killed simply for choosing faith, peace, dialogue, and hope.
And yet, I propose that Christmas still matters.
For Christmas is not primarily a feast of abundance, but of vulnerability. God comes not as a warrior, but as a child. He enters history not through fortified palaces, but through a displaced family searching for shelter. The African experience of Christmas—rooted in family, hospitality, reconciliation, and shared life—offers a powerful antidote to the culture of death now stalking many regions of the continent.
Christmas in Africa, even now, remains a stubborn proclamation: life is stronger than death, family is stronger than fear, and hope—because God has pitched his tent among us—will not be extinguished by the pockets of darkness on the horizon.
