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.

POLAND, 1981

With a long-time foreign correspondent for a father, our three daughters used to say that the toughest question they ever had to answer was: What’s your home address?

Maybe it was out of self-defense that we all came to think of our location of the moment as “home.” So in a sense we were almost always “home” for Christmas.

We were “home” in Moscow in 1977 when our friend Yuri Bessenov, much the worse for liquid holiday cheer, solved the problem of a tree that was too tall for our apartment by lopping three feet off the wrong end. We hung our decorations that year from something that looked more like an evergreen pillar in the corner of the living room.

And we were “home” in Jerusalem in 1986 when our Orthodox Jewish friends, the Landaus, brought their 12-year-old son to our house for his first look at a real Christmas tree. He seemed more impressed with the presents underneath.

In fact, only once in 12 years abroad did the Grinch actually steal a Fisher Christmas. That was in Poland in 1981 when our Grinch was a Polish general named Wojciech Jaruzelski who declared martial law on Dec. 13 in order to stop a political steamroller called Solidarity.

Our daughters were all in a boarding school in Rome that year, and with Poland’s borders closed by the state of emergency, they couldn’t have come “home” even if we had felt it safe. Their mother was eventually able to leave Poland in time to join the girls and old friends in Los Angeles for Christmas. I stayed in Warsaw dodging police barricades, water cannon and truncheon charges, inhaling tear gas and trying to avoid being caught out after curfew while smuggling news stories out of a country cut off from all normal international communication.

Even though they were even more depressed than I, Polish friends did their best to make my Christmas less lonely.

Andrzej Wiecko, a Polish journalist who had been helping me ever since we got to the country the previous summer, had invited me to share a traditional Christmas Eve dinner with his family, for which I was most grateful. His wife, Kristina, apologized several times that food shortages prevented her from serving all of the 12 dishes on the traditional menu for the evening. Presents were sparse--calendars, ballpoint pens, souvenirs. A tiny table-top tree was decorated with real candles that had to be tended closely to prevent a fire.

We broke a traditional Christmas wafer in turn with every other person in the room in a symbolic burying of the hatchet for any bad feelings left over from the previous year. Then we embraced and wished each other not a merry, but a peaceful Christmas before sitting down to dinner.

There was, as is customary at a Polish Christmas Eve, an extra place set at the table. Usually it’s for an unexpected guest. But this night, in homes throughout the country, it was symbolically set for the 5,000 Poles who had been interned by the martial law authorities. Among those detained that night was Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader who will be celebrating this Christmas as his country’s president.