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.

HONG KONG, 1976

The Chinese have an apt expression for what I suffered my first Christmas as a foreign correspondent-- si jia bing , or heart-and-mind-are-thinking-of-home sickness . I played a taped version of Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” so often that my husband began leaving the room whenever I approached the stereo. I’d been married for nine years and had a son who was almost 4, but that Christmas in Hong Kong was the first I’d spent so far away from home. Suddenly I was seized by the idea--erroneous, it turned out--that if my little family was going to have a real Christmas, it was entirely up to me to create it.

Like all American China-watchers in those days before the United States extended full diplomatic recognition to China, I was consigned to Hong Kong; I monitored China from afar. Hong Kong can be a wonderful place, but it isn’t really China. And, as I was painfully aware that Christmas, it isn’t exactly the West, either. Despite all the exotic wonders and legendary bargains of Hong Kong’s shops, the ingredients of an American Christmas were not to be found.

Take, for example, the matter of a Christmas tree. Hong Kong is not blessed with trees, although farmers cultivate peach trees that are dismantled, bough by bough, and sold for Chinese New Year celebrations. A few enterprising nurserymen import some wispy little pines from Taiwan for Christmas, but one look at these bedraggled specimens made me want to cry. A hardware store that catered to gweilos (foreigners) boasted of its artificial trees; I disdained artificial trees.

Then Ah-chung, a street-wise former cab driver who worked for my husband’s company, heard a rumor that in Pokfulham, just west of Central Hong Kong, someone was selling trees from Texas. Ah-chung, my husband Jay and I jumped in the car and, by driving up and down every lane in Pokfulham, found the Christmas tree lot. The trees, gloriously tall, dense Douglas firs, were picture-perfect. Then my husband examined the price tag on the 10-foot-tall tree I liked best. “This one is 600 Hong Kong dollars,” he sputtered. “That’s $120.” I was already writing out the check. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Jay wailed. Ah-chung and I ignored him.

Once we got the tree home to our flat, we discovered, of course, that our meager collection of ornaments didn’t begin to cover its broad branches. But our son Joe, the most methodical child I’ve ever known, started making paper chains and aluminum foil stars. Soon Ah-chung and I were cutting and pasting paper chains, too. We became a paper-chain-making factory. Even Jay made a few.

Locating the essentials for Christmas dinner proved almost as hard. I never found pumpkin or mincemeat, but Ah-chung, the master sleuth, somehow turned up cornmeal for corn bread stuffing and a turkey frozen so hard it took three days to thaw. But what to serve for dessert? With a call home to Redlands, Calif., I got the recipe for Aunt Fern’s chocolate pie, a concoction so loaded with butter and sugar that it should carry health warnings.

One of the journalists we’d invited to Christmas dinner volunteered to make eggnog, though it turned out to be his maiden effort and we didn’t have a recipe. After a lot of experimentation, we ended up with a broth that was largely bourbon with nutmeg swimming on top. Ah-chung, who came to Christmas dinner with an anthropologist-like interest in these proceedings, pronounced the eggnog “delicious.”

In time, I grew more relaxed about Christmas and began to savor Chinese New Year: There’s nothing quite like a peach bough bursting into bloom in your living room. But that first Hong Kong Christmas stays with me. I still have remnants of the paper chains we made for that Texas-sized tree. And Joe, now 17 and 6 feet tall and as stalwart as he was as a little boy, makes Aunt Fern’s chocolate pie every year for Christmas dinner.