The annual event coinciding with the holiday kicked off with participants meeting at the Comfort Suites on West Third Street.

who welcomed diners and posed for photos. Across town, vendors sold ornaments at Christkindlmarkt, in the shadow of rusting blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel illuminated in red and green.

"For Christmas cards, it makes a nice picture having a comet and a tail ... "You can't follow a star from Baghdad to Jerusalem to Bethlehem," Weintraub said. "Stars don't do that.

Was the “Star of Bethlehem” an actual astronomical event ... (Photo By Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG Via Getty Images) 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler—known for his laws of planetary ...