AMERICAN CHRISTMAS:

This Christmas in New Hampshire, if you wish, you can hear the Catholic Mass said in Portuguese at a Nashua church or in Vietnamese in Manchester. A Concord church will celebrate the birth of the Christ child in Swahili.

A Presbyterian church in Rochester will sing and pray in Indonesian. And Christmas carols will be sung in Polish at a Manchester cathedral.

The language and customs may vary but the story they all celebrate is timeless and universal.

The Rev. Jason Wells is executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches. An Episcopal priest, he'll preach on Christmas at the state prison for women.

Wells said the story of the nativity transcends cultural and language differences.

"If we're middle class people who will go back to our Christmas trees in the suburbs, like me, or if we're women in prison on a drug charge, or if we're here from another country where we rarely hear our own language spoken anymore except when we go to church, we're reaching the same human nature, the same kinds of concerns and fears, doubts and addictions," Wells said. "We all have need of the same message of hope."

Bishop Paul Sobiechowski is pastor of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Manchester, a parish of the Polish National Catholic Church. These days, he said, most parishioners are fourth- or fifth-generation Polish, so the Mass is celebrated in English.

But some of the carols they sing on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day will be in the old tongue. And families will celebrate traditional customs, breaking the "oplatki" wafer that is embossed with a nativity scene before sharing a meatless dinner on Christmas Eve.

For believers, Sobiechowski said, "Christmas is the celebration of that moment in time when God became man."

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