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.

ISRAEL AND OCCUPIED WEST BANK, 1987

Like Mary and Joseph, the last place my wife and I expected to spend Christmas was Bethlehem.

We had just moved into a new house on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus in December. We were in the process of decorating a pine tree freshly chopped in the Troodos Mountains when the telephone call came informing me that demonstrations by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank were getting out of hand. I was to proceed at once to Jerusalem.

The Old City of Jerusalem has always held a special fascination for me, a powerful mixture of history and stark beauty. In the stone streets already worn smooth when King Richard the Lion-Hearted stood at the gates, it is still not unusual to hear the high-pitched call to prayer of the Muslim muezzin mingling with the toll of church bells as old as Christianity itself.

But by December, the city had been transformed by the politics of the intifada , a word then rarely heard. Instead of the rhythmic tolling of bells, we heard the crash of plate-glass windows and the popping of army rifles.

I drove through the West Bank, which travelers once called The Holy Land, and found the road to Bethlehem empty but for a few Israeli soldiers. There was a Christmas tree in Manger Square decked out in colored balls, but the shops were shuttered in a protest strike. Everyone on the streets kept looking nervously up at the sharpshooters placed strategically around the square, overlooking the Church of the Nativity, which tradition holds to be the spot where Jesus was born. “People don’t feel up to celebrating Christmas in this atmosphere,” said Bishara E. Awad, who runs the Bethlehem Bible College.

With the sodium security floodlights, it was hard to imagine three wise men losing their way in the desert. As I walked down the narrow streets of the town, Israeli soldiers in brown uniforms brushed past, eyes flicking over the faces staring back out of the old stone houses. The entire economy of Bethlehem depends heavily on pilgrims coming for Christmas, and it was clear that no one was coming. Bethlehem’s shops contain every imaginable form of the creche scene--from illuminated lamps to ashtrays. But nobody was buying.

Back in Jerusalem, a beard of tear gas hung over the Arab quarter. I managed a candlelit dinner and watched midnight Mass in Bethlehem on television. The camera kept panning to the front pew, where a policeman, obviously expecting trouble, was fingering his gun. Omar, our Muslim waiter, appeared with tears on his cheeks. “Isn’t it awful?” he said. “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Some Merry Christmas.”