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.

EGYPT, 1989

It was my first Christmas away from home, last Christmas in Cairo, and I approached the holiday with the bravado of a fledgling foreign correspondent halfway around the world from L.A. and determined not to be bothered by trifles like holidays.

“Christmas?” I told my neighbor Khalid when he asked what I was doing Christmas Eve. “Oh, I guess it’s Christmas, isn’t it? I’d nearly forgotten.”

Khalid, an occasionally devout Muslim, knew all about Christmas. Lots of Christians live in Egypt, though they’re not much heard from as a rule. Besides, he’d worked for over a year in a New Jersey diner washing dishes with a bunch of other expatriate Egyptians.

We only knew each other from brief exchanges on the street corner, waiting for taxis. Once, I’d gone to the shish kebab restaurant near Talaat Harb Square where Khalid kept the books for his father, carefully weighing the leftover meat at the end of each night, tallying how many kebabs were sold and entering the figures in careful Arabic script in a worn ledger he kept above the cash register. The ledgers went back to 1947.

A few days after the night I ate at his restaurant, he called me. Remember his brother, he asked me, the one he’d told me about who’d recently gotten off heroin and gotten a new job? Yes, I said. Well, he’d woken up that morning and found his brother dead in the bed beside him. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” I ventured. “I think God, he must have decided it,” he said simply.

I hung up as fast as I could, unwilling to shoulder this man’s grief on top of all my own worries. A few days after that, Khalid called again. He said he thought I shouldn’t spend Christmas Eve alone. Why didn’t he bring some kebabs over from the restaurant and we could have Christmas dinner, he said. I thought about it, and brightened. No, I said, I’d make duck a l’orange .

I always made duck a l’orange on Christmas Eve in Laguna Beach. My girlfriend Dixie from Huntington Beach would come over, and my boyfriend, and maybe my sister and her husband, and we’d drink champagne and call our friends all night long, until it was time for midnight Mass.

I told Khalid about this, and he brought champagne. After the second glass that night, we got to reminiscing and I said being a foreign correspondent wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it was going to be. He said working in the New Jersey diner hadn’t been all he’d expected, either. The owner thought there were “too many damned Egyptians” around and didn’t want to pay them right, he said.

I said guys from New Jersey were like that, they didn’t mean anything by it. He said he was glad to be back in Egypt. From my apartment window, we looked at the moon’s shimmering light festooning the surface of the Nile, “like Christmas lights,” I said.

With that, he pulled a small silver bracelet out of his pocket, made of tiny beetles called scarabs, the Egyptians’ favorite good luck charm. “Merry Christmas,” he said shyly.

I was dismayed I hadn’t thought to get him a present. I barely knew him, of course, and after all, who’d think of celebrating Christmas in Cairo? I apologized. He said I didn’t need to, didn’t I know how good it was just having someone to talk to who knew what it was like to be alone?

After a few more glasses of champagne, I taught him how to sing “Silent Night.” We went out onto the balcony and tried it ensemble, our tentative voices quickly smothered in the din of all the donkey carts, honking taxis and families strolling along the river banks who didn’t know it was Christmas Eve.

I didn’t see Khalid much after that. I got busy with work again, he was always tied up at the restaurant, and now I’ve been in the Gulf for the last three months covering the Kuwait crisis and looking at celebrating this Christmas in, of all places, Saudi Arabia.

Next year, God willing, I’ll be back in Laguna Beach for Christmas. But it won’t be the same, not like that night in the chaos of Cairo where the only thing silent was the relentless flow of the Nile and two strangers gazing out on it on a dark Christmas Eve.