Khan Younis, Gaza – In a makeshift kitchen with a sand floor and a nylon roof and without the most basic equipment, Mayess Hamid prepared Christmas cookies this year.
Hamid, 31, has been baking cakes and cookies for about a decade and worked in one of Gaza’s largest pastry shops before it was destroyed in Israel’s ongoing war against the besieged enclave.
Like many others in Gaza, she lost her job when the bakery where she worked was bombed.
“I wanted to start the year on an optimistic note and bake Christmas cookies to distribute to the children around me at camp,” she says while kneading.
“The war turned our lives upside down. I lost my income and my home was destroyed,” says Hamid, who has been displaced nine times since her family left Zeitoun, east of Gaza City, and has now settled in al-Mawasi in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
“My kids are excited, waiting anxiously and trying to help, especially with decorating,” she adds, arranging the cookies on a baking sheet.
Making cookies has been a challenge because shortages of staple foods are so severe that famine is raging in some parts of the Gaza Strip.
Since the beginning of the war, Israel has largely blocked the entry of aid and trade supplies.
Based on her experience, she replaces unavailable materials with things she can find.
“Before the war, I decorated cakes with ready-made sugar paste. Now I use a mixture of liquid cheese and powdered sugar and it works,” she says.
Since Hamid didn’t have Christmas cookie cutters, she used her cell phone to draw stencils on paper, cut them out, and shaped the dough by hand with a knife.
“Even simple tasks like baking cookies became challenges during the war,” she says as she arranges the cookies and prepares them to bake in a nearby clay oven that the entire camp relies on.
“From gathering the materials to shaping the dough to baking, every step feels unfamiliar and complicated.”
While the second batch of cookies is being baked, Hamid begins decorating the first batch in her small tent.
“The war may have destroyed my home and my life as I knew it, but it didn’t destroy my passion for decorating and my attention to detail,” she says, looking around her tidy tent.
As Hamid tries to bring a festive atmosphere to the refugee camp, she cannot hide her sadness that the world is celebrating Christmas as usual while Gaza is experiencing a second year of war and devastation.
“We try to smile, but our wounds run deep and there is little we can do. We feel forgotten.”
At the same time, she still clings to the hope that this Christmas will bring peace. Her only Christmas wish is for the war to end.
“Just let the war stop. Let the killing and destruction end so that we can live in peace with our children,” she says.
