As Christmas nears, this column takes an annual look at the plight of Christians under assault around the world.

The Muslim-dominated Arab Mideast, where Christian populations dwindle faster than January job opportunities for jolly, red-suited men, is at the eye of this storm.

And Lebanon is always a good weather vane for Mideast trends.

Christians there warily eye events across the border, where Syrian Christians are being slaughtered, in village after village, by various jihadi groups — not only for their longtime cooperation with the ruling Assad regime, but also for, well, simply being Christians.

To avert a similar fate, Christians living near the Syrian border are forming, in the best Lebanese tradition, local armed militias, hoping to fend off the jihadis, if and when they come across.

Lebanon’s Christians (mostly Maronite, but of other denominations as well), are a unique community in the Arab world.

No longer a majority, they yet remain the largest Christian community, percentage-wise, living in Mideastern countries. But, as regional trends deepen, their presence is increasingly in peril.

Why?

As Adla Masoud, a Lebanese-born, New York-based film and television producer, says, “When I was a girl, women on the beaches in the north of Lebanon were wearing bikinis. They used to hang out with men. Lebanon was super Westernized.”

But now “women no longer do that,” she says. Tripoli, the northern Lebanese town she remembers for its beautiful beaches, filled with bikini-clad sun bathers, has become a hub of Islamist sensibilities.

“Tripoli is like Kandahar now,” says Masoud, who’s “Wild is the Spring,” a documentary examining the predicament of Mideast Christians in the post-“Arab Spring” era, is expected to be completed in the coming months.

Her homeland had long been more welcoming for Christians than other Arab lands. With strong Christian and French influences, Beirut, an easy-going hub of free commerce and good living, was called “Paris of the Mideast.” And so it was.

No longer. In the 1980s even New York hipsters heard of the chaos, cruelty and mayhem of Lebanon’s civil war, naming an East Village bar “Downtown Beirut.”

In Lebanon, those who weren’t directly involved in the wars fled the country as soon as they found their way out.

Mideast Christians have always found it easier than Muslims to resettle in the affluent, Christian-dominated societies of Europe and the Americas.

Lebanon’s Maronites, and the other Christian denominations, emigrated in droves during those hopeless civil-war years.

The numbers are staggering: In 1926, when the newly independent Lebanon conducted its first census, Christians accounted for 84 percent of the population.

By 1932, when the last census was done, they were 51.2 percent. They were still half the country by mid-century, but by 1985, only a quarter of all Lebanese were Christians.

And though some returned after the civil war ended, their numbers are now estimated at no higher than 35 percent of the population.

Decades of war, emigration and relatively low birth rates have weakened Christians politically as well. Lebanon’s government has long been divided in three: A Sunni prime minister, a Shiite speaker of Parliament and a Christian president.

But there hasn’t been a president in Beirut since Michel Suleiman’s term ended in May. Suleiman was chosen as a compromise candidate between warring Christian factions with divided loyalties.

No such compromise candidate seems to emerge now, as Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea and Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun vie for the position. Neither of these unattractive candidates has gathered enough support to win the presidency.

Lebanon has also long been the place where Mideasterners went to wage proxy wars. Currently, Iran is exerting power there through its Hezbollah terror army.

Some Sunnis are beginning to seek alliances with the various regional jihadi groups. The Druze, another perennial player among Lebanon’s faction, tend to bet on the strongest horse.

And the Christians are divided: Geagea strongly opposes Iran and Syria’s ruling Assad family; Aoun, who was once anti-Assad as well, is now an ally of Damascus. The division weakens Christian political power.

So more and more Christians once again are looking to emigrate. The West may welcome them, but it’s not likely to help them restore their once-dominant presence in the land where Jesus and his disciples preached and sought refuge in the early days of Christianity.

And Lebanon may one day, not too long from now, go the way of the rest of the region, where Christians are an endangered species.