I have found the place where the Three Wise Men did their Christmas shopping: Salalah, a city that lies on Oman's gloriously turquoise southern coast. The souk here smells like the churches of my youth, its scent conjuring the solemn midnight masses I attended on Christmas Eve, when the priest would shake the thurible over his congregation, dousing it in a veil of frankincense.
As the vapour dissipated, the voices of the choir would rise in joyous song, harking the herald angels, wising joy to the world, enjoining the faithful to come, oh come all ye! The solemnity evaporated too, and a sense of elation settled over us where the frankincense had been. We streamed out of church into a new day, a world alive with possibility.
My faith has quivered just as surely as those smoky whorls, but the nostalgia ignited by frankincense in the souk brings a smile of remembrance to my face. I am in a world far removed from the Christian tradition of my upbringing — a broad frill of desert sewn (alongside Yemen) onto Saudi Arabia's hem; a Middle Eastern, mostly-Islamic country characterised by domed-and-tiled mosques, women wearing hijabs and the call-to-prayer riding on the hot breeze.
But the substances that vivify the story of Jesus' birth — and which the Three Wise Men carried all the way to Bethlehem — are for sale here in this southern Dhofar region of Oman: gold, frankincense and myrrh. In the frankincense souk, traders offer containers filled with raisins of amber-coloured myrrh — the hardened gum of the thorny Commiphora tree. In the gold souk, gilt-drenched shopfronts line an entire street; merchants drape customers in tiaras of gold and cascading necklaces of gold and extravagant gold jewellery fit for a (newborn) king.
But it's frankincense for which this region is best known (apart from its attraction during the monsoon, when Dhofar turns green beneath a shroud of rain and visitors fleeing the unbearable summer months in the northern Gulf States camp out below joyfully gushing skies).
Indeed, it was in this region to which merchants and traders from Rome and Ancient Greece, from India and the Far East and Europe were drawn between the third century BC and the fifth century AD. They would load their ships with priceless pearls of frankincense and shepherd them back across the seas to awaiting buyers flush with cash.
The trees from which these scented beads are harvested