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.

LONDON, 1974

When I needed a good quote in my days as a London correspondent, I always turned to Mr. Herbert, the friendly wine merchant who spoke in word bites for newspapermen. What did Londoners think of their economy? What does bad weather do to the English soul? Ask Herbert.

One day he disappeared, off to Australia to live, he was. It seemed to be a plot to deprive an American reporter of his ration of pithy quotes. But, suddenly, six months later, he was back for good. And still in form.

“Living in Australia,” he said, “was like living in a brand-new railroad station where the train never comes.”

I think of the quote when I think of London during the holidays because that’s like living in an old railroad station where the train never comes. London at this time of year gives a whole new meaning to the word boring .

The city seems to close down for days on end. Where is everyone? Are they all in Mallorca? Are they hiding out and sharpening elbows to prepare for the annual Harrods sale? What’s happening in the world?

All this is an exaggeration, of course, but it doesn’t seem to be if you live through it, and we lived through seven of these “festive” seasons in London, from 1967 to 1974. No tubes, buses or trains run on Christmas Day and no newspapers are published.

The British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert, traditional great escapes, close down for four days. One of my favorite restaurants, the White Tower, puts away its wonderful Greek cuisine from Dec. 21 until after New Year’s. The after-Christmas sales at the major stores do not begin Dec. 26, but the 27th, and the hectic, uncivil Harrods sale is not until Jan. 4.

So what did we do? We watched the annual Christmas message from Queen Elizabeth II on televison and, for extra excitement, we watched it again.

Sometimes, we looked at some of the other holiday fare on the BBC--the habits of either the Slavonian Grebe or the elusive Tree Creeper and, if the kids were asleep, we clandestinely viewed a documentary on the future of rubbish in S.W. 1.

Perhaps part of the problem was that we were never invited to the country with the posh, who spoke later of groaning boards and black ties during the season, a tradition the British noblesse stole from the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite.

We stayed behind and waited, waited for London to get back to its normal self.

One thing we did while waiting for the city to revive was to plan summer holidays before all the reasonable “all-in” package trips were booked. For by Christmas Day, every home in the nation had a pile of just-published brochures from the British tour operators who knew that people, including expatriate Americans, were looking for something, anything, to read.

So, we considered two days in Leningrad. The tulip season in the Netherlands had an appeal. And, we thought, one day in Mallorca would allow us to see whether any Londoners were left over from Christmas.

On balance, there are worse places to be this time of year and there is certainly nothing wrong with the place the rest of the year. Sometimes, I wonder what Mr. Herbert would say about London’s holiday wonderland. I’ll ask him for a quote the next time I see him.