What was going on when I was born?

It was not a white Christmas, to be sure, dulled as it was to a sort of coastal, oyster gray. But in certain spots of the city, something shimmered, if only briefly. For many, the day was bright. ''It's spiritually beautiful,'' said Lascell Johnson as he sat down to a chicken dinner prepared by the Salvation Army and served to more than 400 people on West 125th Street.

Some Republicans who generally support President Reagan are opposing the Administration's efforts to dismantle the 19-month-old Department of Education. After meetings with key legislators over the last two weeks, Education Secretary T.H. Bell expressed hope that his plan to make the department a ''foundation'' below Cabinet rank will be approved by Congress next spring and take effect Oct. 1, 1982. Nevertheless, he conceded that ''we're going to have a tough fight,'' largely because it is opposed by such Republicans as Senator William V. Roth Jr. of Delaware, the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, which handles reorganization bills. ''Senator Roth was as nice as he can be,'' Mr. Bell said in an interview. ''He just told me that he had worked hard for the department and couldn't understand why I wanted to do what I wanted to do.''

The Soviet Union today published the most comprehensive charges to date that events in Poland over the last 17 months were part of a long and intricate campaign by the United States to wrest Poland from the Communist camp. Western diplomats asserted that the 3,600-word Pravda article by Vladimir Bolshakov was less remarkable for the substance of its claims than for what it revealed about the Kremlin's insecurity and suspicion. Mr. Bolshakov described virtually every Polish emigre organization, thousands of Polish-Americans who returned to retire in Poland, all the supplies and donations sent to Solidarity and virtually every contact between the labor union and the West as part of a web spun by the United States Central Intelligence Agency ''to undermine the socialist statehood and to create conditions for a counterrevolutionary coup.'' (Asked to comment on the Pravda article, Mark D. Weinberg, the assistant White House press secretary, said in Washington: ''Charges similar to these have been made in the past. There was no truth to them then and there is no truth to them now.'')

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview published today that the strategic cooperation agreement between the United States and Israel still ''formally'' existed. Prime Minister Menachem Begin said earlier this week that he felt the United States had canceled the agreement by announcing a suspension of talks to carry out the pact. The United States canceled the talks after Israel annexed the Golan Heights in a surprise move. In the interview, published today in the newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, Mr. Sharon said the Golan annexation had been prompted by an American plan to force Israel to return all land it conquered in the 1967 Middle East war. He said termination of the strategic agreement required six months' notice.

At age 41, Paul Hanson is used to making what he calls ''great money'' as a pipe designer. But in October, he was laid off by the Manhattan engineering company he had been working for, and his situation has become grim. ''My business is very slow,'' he said. ''Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania - they're all way down for engineering. They're just not hiring.'' With a wife and three children to support, Mr. Hanson is worried. He has used up his savings and money borrowed from relatives, but that, too, is running out.

Pope John Paul II, departing from the text of his annual Christmas message today, sent an embrace to ''all of Poland, our common homeland'' and offered a prayer for a ''better future of the homeland, in peace, in justice, in liberty.'' The Polish-born Pope did not mention Poland by name in the main body of his message ''Urbi et Orbi'' - ''To the City and the World.'' But he warned the tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square of ''the world that does not accept God,'' in which, he said, people are driven from work, locked in concentration camps, condemned to hunger and made slaves. When the Pope stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, his face seemed dark and sad, as it had at a midnight mass earlier. But it brightened as he saw dozens of Polish flags and a white streamer with the word ''Solidarity'' painted in red waving in the back of the crowd. And in the departure from his text he sent a greeting to the labor movement, which has been the main target of the martial law crackdown that began in Poland Dec. 13.

A close-up view of Orvieto Cathedral's 14th-century bas-relief after it was damaged by vandals.

The following dispatch is based on information arriving from Poland: The Warsaw branch of the suspended Solidarity labor union has called on workers to continue their campaign of resistance to Poland's martial law regime after the Christmas holiday. A Solidarity news bulletin, dated Dec. 23 and clandestinely distributed in Warsaw yesterday, reported that negotiations were under way between officials of the Polish Episcopate and the country's top Communist Party officials, including the Polish leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, seeking ''a political solution'' to the crisis caused by the imposition of martial law. Party Leaders Urged to Quit The Solidarity news bulletin called on all Communist Party leaders to resign and urged continued social protest to ''strengthen the position of representatives of the church'' during the talks. (The Warsaw radio, in a broadcast monitored outside Poland, said more than 1,200 coal miners continued to strike in Katowice Province to protest martial law. But the radio said most striking workers at a nearby mine had ended their protest and joined their families for Christmas. Page 8.)

It was very cold one recent morning in the Negev Desert. Inside the goat-hair tent of Swaylim Abu Bilaya, a Bedouin of the Azazmah tribe, a fire of twigs crackled at dawn, warming his three guests. He had covered them with thick quilts for the night, and now he was making sweet tea in a blackened pot, his leathery face set off against his white kaffiyeh in the fire's glow. The three visitors were Mohammed el-Khishkhar, a princely Bedouin from a neighboring tribe; Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has spent a decade studying the Bedouins, and this correspondent.

Christian militiamen in southern Lebanon expelled 16 villagers from their homes during the night, maintaining that the villagers were supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a United Nations spokesman said Friday. The militiamen ordered the 16 to move to Tyre, the Lebanese port and P.L.O. stronghold, a spokesman for the United Nations force in Lebanon said. The Christians said P.L.O. guerrillas had kidnapped eight promilitia villagers and were holding them hostage until a captured guerrilla was returned.

A broad segment of public opinion, both here and in Ireland, has united against the American Government's decision this week to bar a visit by the Rev. Ian Paisley. As expected, Mr. Paisley, the fiery Protestant leader, reacted furiously to the cancellation of his visa on Monday, calling it part of a British-American plot to force Northern Ireland into unification with the Republic. In the days since then, all three of London's major newspapers, though not defending Mr. Paisley's views, have questioned the wisdom of keeping him out of the United States, and so have a number of other moderates.

Police reported Friday the first arrests of members of the Rev. Ian Paisley's Protestant paramilitary Third Force. A spokesman for the Royal Ulster Constabulary - the mainly Protestant police force - said ''a number of men'' were arrested Thursday in County Fermanagh and would be charged next week in connection with operating illegal road blocks.