Paul Calvert spoke with Jack Giacaman.

Jack Giacaman

In Bethlehem many people rely on tourism to make a living. Jack Giacaman has a shop and factory making nativity sets with olive wood, employing 25 local people, and without tourists he couldn't survive. Paul Calvert spoke with him about his work and love for Bethlehem.

Paul: Why do you work with olive wood?

Jack: Olive wood is a very unique wood in colour. It's a very strong wood and you can make a lot of things that become beautiful, without being an artistic piece. Just a plain piece of wood is still a nice thing to look on, because of the beauty of the grain. Of course the tree of the olive wood is very holy here in the Holy Land; it is since Noah's ark when the bird came with an olive branch. Until today, we use it in our olive oil and olive fruit. It's a very important tree here in the Holy Land, in the Palestinian Authority as a tree.

Paul: And how do you prepare the wood before you make it into a product?

Jack: First we get the wood from farmers who do pruning on their trees and they collect it and we buy it. Then after buying it, we dry it. The wood dries one inch per year from the outside, so some branches need one year, some two years, some three years and some four years to dry. Not all of it is good for carving, some of it is just wood for fire, so we have to dry it and divide the wood into which is good and which is bad and which we can make figures and Christmas ornaments with.

Olive wood is hard and strong wood, so if you make a statue it's not easy to break. The grain comes in more than one direction, which makes it very nice when you sand it and shape the things in it.

Paul: Wow, so you are investing money in wood that you are not going to use for a long time.

Jack: Yes, we invest in wood and sometimes when we want to make a big nativity set, like 65cm high, you have to search for the wood five-six years until you manage to make one nativity set. One I have here, took me five years to find 13 pieces to make just a set like that.

Paul: So how much wood do you get through in a year?

Jack: It depends. Some years we can get a lot and some years few. After the good harvest, the farmers prune a lot of their trees and they sell it to us. They don't do pruning for the same tree once every two, or five, or 10 years.

Paul: Is there a specific time of year when they do the pruning?

Jack: Yes, the pruning after the harvest, which is October, November, December until the beginning of January, then after that no-one will touch the tree. So we buy the wood in October, November, December and we will not have the opportunity to get it in the summer, or in the spring, only at the end of the year. You always have to have enough storage and sometimes we get orders that we can't do because we don't have the wood.

Paul: You have a factory as well as a shop. What sort of things do you make?

Jack: Since we are in Bethlehem and Bethlehem is a religious town, the town of Jesus' birth, we mainly do nativity sets. That includes the three wise men, Mary, Joseph and of course the baby Jesus and the animals that belong to the stable. This is number one for sales. In the last seven years the most popular nativity set is the one with the wall. 60% of our sales are nativity sets with the wall and the rest 40% are the normal nativity set.