Barentsburg, Norway (AP) -- A 15-year-old boy in a polar bear hoodie took turns reading the Gospel passage about Jesus’s birth in Russian with three girls in dresses and bows who proclaimed it in Norwegian, in a shared celebration of Orthodox Christmas deep in the Arctic undimmed by war and the round-the-clock polar night.
The girls and a dozen of their fellow members of Polargospel, the children’s choir at the only church in Svalbard – an archipelago closer to the North Pole than to either Oslo or Moscow – traveled three hours by boat Saturday to mark the holiday with the 40 children in Barentsburg.
