CHRISTMAS: I Won’t Be Home for the Holidays

For Travelers, there is inevitably a moment when the exhilaration of discovery gives way to an acute sense of being a stranger in a very foreign place. As soldiers, diplomats and foreign correspondents know, that sense of displacement may be keenest at times of traditional togetherness and homecoming. Here, current and former foreign correspondents share some of their most memorable Christmases away from home.

ROMANIA, 1989

Last year, after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was unexpectedly overthrown and forced to flee, I was asked by my editors to try to get into Romania as quickly as possible. That was Dec. 22, three days before Christmas.

It was a time of great uncertainty and confusion in Romania. Secret police units that remained loyal to Ceausescu battled with pro-rebel soldiers in Bucharest and Timisoara, the western Romanian city where the revolt against the dictator had begun. There were stories of hundreds, even thousands of deaths.

I decided to fly to Belgrade, cross the Romanian border in eastern Yugoslavia and make my way to Timisoara by car. As I packed my bag that night, my wife slipped in four small gift-wrapped Christmas presents. Two slim, soft packages from my 3-year-old daughter obviously contained some kind of clothing. A fancy gold cellophane bag from a chocolatier in our Paris neighborhood promised me something sweet. The fourth gift, a small, rather heavy box, was more of a mystery.

I teamed up with French journalist Philippe Chatenay in Belgrade. We rented a car together at the Belgrade airport and began our drive toward Romania Saturday evening, Dec. 23, under a pall of encroaching darkness and drizzling rain. The Romanian border guards were drunk but still demanded money for visas. A large billboard at the border post advertised the Hotel Continental in Timisoara, which it claimed was a true luxury hotel with all imaginable amenities. The picture of the hotel on the billboard showed a solid, Stalinist-style building several stories high. Lacking knowledge of anything better, we made the Continental our destination.

Getting there, however, was not easy. On the drive into Timisoara we were repeatedly stopped at roadblocks manned by gun- and club-toting “citizens” of the New Romania. They frisked us, inspected our bags, asked for cigarettes and warned us about shooting ahead. Sure enough, as we approached Timisoara we could see the glowing trails of tracer bullets above the city’s modest skyline.

After becoming separated from Chatenay during a burst of gunfire near the train station, I spent most of the night crouched in the stairwell of an office building. Occasionally, the citizens’ patrols would come, point guns and flashlights in my face and ask me questions. They said they were looking for Libyan terrorists. Wild rumors about specially trained Libyan assassins, masters of disguise, coursed the Timisoara streets.

Chatenay and I found each other early the next morning. We made it to the Continental Hotel, or what was left of it, on Christmas Eve. Hotel staffers crouched low and sprinted when they passed windows that opened onto the street. A self-appointed press spokesman for the Romanian revolution warned us to be careful. The night before, he said, eight foreign reporters had been wounded in Timisoara. We soon learned that two Americans were among them.

Christmas morning I awoke in my room at the Continental to a deafening exchange of gunfire and the sound of glass shattering in nearby rooms. I rolled off my bed and over against the wall. The gunfire continued unabated. I found myself crouched next to the bag containing my Christmas packages from home. Not knowing when I would get another chance, I decided to open them.

The soft packages contained two T-shirts that had been decorated by my children. My 3-year-old had painted a Christmas tree on one of the shirts. She and my 1-year-old son, obviously assisted by my wife, had decorated the other with hand- and footprints made with different colors of paint. I could make out their marvelously tiny fingers and toes. I held the shirts close to my chest and wept.

The cellophane bag contained hand-dipped chocolates. The heavy little box held a very expensive tin of foie gras from Petrossian, a famous Paris caviar and delicacy shop. The irony of receiving such a gift at such a time made me smile. The gunfire stopped.

I managed to cadge some hard, stale rolls from the hotel. Later that night, two other American correspondents and I shared the rolls and the foie gras as we rode on a train bound for Bucharest. We sliced the rolls and the foie gras with our pocket knives to make a kind of open-faced sandwich. It was Christmas dinner. When we finished, we took turns talking about the best Christmas meals we had ever had. Shortly before midnight, the train conductor came into our compartment. Had we heard the news? he asked. Ceausescu was dead. Holding his index finger as though it were a knife, he made a slashing motion across his neck and smiled.