A Family Christmas at Sea

Until two years ago, we Californians wouldn’t have dreamed of spending Christmas at sea in the Caribbean. After all, our daughter was 7, and at that age, Christmas requires a fireplace for hanging stockings, an address where you know S. Claus will find you (even if you are beginning to suspect his true identity) and good 7-year-old friends to admire your loot. And, if raised in the Currier and Ives tradition as my husband and I were, you don’t trade your own personally decorated Douglas fir, family-tradition feasting and the neighbor teens caroling at your door for some glitzy packaged Yule in an alien clime.

On the other hand, if you’re balancing two full-time jobs with family needs and you’re too tired to think past Halloween, an ad for a Christmas cruise looks tempting. Factor in the line “Children under 16 travel free” and the idea becomes irresistible.

Not, of course, to Alexis. She had enjoyed a short cruise two years earlier, but Christmas away from home? “It’ll be gross,” she wailed.

The more we looked into it, the more compelling a Christmas without responsibilities looked to Van and me. We checked a couple of cruise lines and settled on the Sun Line (now Royal Olympic Cruises). Its Stella Solaris was small, expecting only about 400 passengers, including at least 15 children, for a 12-day swing through the Caribbean. With a giddiness born of guilt and truancy, we sent a check for two adult fares (about $2,800 each), booked a flight to Miami and stocked up on sunscreen.

The first real qualms hit us when we saw the Stella Solaris docked in Fort Lauderdale. Could a Greek cruise ship staff pull off a meaningful Christmas? What would it be like to share this sentimental holiday with a couple of hundred strangers?

Once aboard, we saw that a major effort had been made. The halls were decked with boughs of holly, all right--real holly, not plastic. There was a lavishly decorated 10-foot Scotch pine in the central foyer. The dining salon welcomed us with a 4-foot-high gingerbread house, a white and silver flocked Douglas fir and poinsettias at every serving station.

That first evening, Alexis kept her eye out for a likely shipboard friend: a girl, preferably age 8, approachable and smart but not too precocious. (Angela, from Philadelphia, was all that and more; she and Alexis still keep in touch.)

Ten families, we discovered, had opted for the children-cruise-free package. Several were single-parent units; two were widowed grandmothers with grandchildren. Almost everyone else on board, even two honeymooning couples, was middle-aged or older, interested in sea, fun and sun, not heavy-duty yuling. That evening at dinner, I picked up on the vibes: Most weren’t crazy about cruising with 19 kids on board and hoped they would be little seen and even less heard.

Their hopes were happily met, thanks to a program that kept the kids busy from after breakfast till bedtime, with time out only for mealtime reunions or shore excursions with parents. (This is one piece of advice I’d give anyone considering a family cruise: Get a detailed description of the children’s program.)

Olga, the youth counselor, immediately put her charges to work collecting materials for collages. This would go on for days, aboard and ashore, the children sniffing about like retrievers for items that, once assembled, would sum up each kid’s view of the cruise experience. Seashells, mermaid stickers, plastic turtles, swizzle sticks and even purloined whistles from life jackets turned up on these amazing productions in a gallery showing in the Main Lounge.

Hutch, the assistant cruise director, taught the youth contingent the “sailor’s walk,” feet apart and pointing outward to brace against a pitching deck. Thus, despite seas that were pond-smooth, the youngsters lurched about like drunken penguins. (My second and last bit of advice: Choose a cruise with the least likelihood of rough seas; children’s stomachs are easily upset.)

Two hyper boys were given walkie-talkies and assigned to report regularly to Hutch on what was going on in various remote areas of the ship.

Several adolescents were put to work assisting with lighting for the nightly cabaret shows. They picked up pocket money selling the younger kids the flowers that fell from the star’s headdress.

One morning between island stops found all the 5- to 12-year-olds and most of the fathers on the Lido Deck launching kites. When one lovely rice-paper flier danced into the ship’s radar, the first officer emerged from the bridge; he was not amused.

We had booked one of the more spacious cabins--16 by 20 feet--but even so, family intimacy was not always at its best.

Our steward, Teodoro, took care of us almost lovingly. When he turned down our beds each evening, he left little printed cards on our pillows with homilies like “The most important piece of luggage is and remains a joyful heart.”

Alexis never did warm up to the crew, most of them young and homesick and used to closeness with children. Alexis, like most urban American children, has been taught to avoid strangers, not to speak to them or even look them in the eye. More than once I found myself explaining that she was not being rude. Invariably the response was regret that American children have to be so wary.

There were seven port calls on our 12-day itinerary. Aware that a 7-year-old is not your most willing sightseer, we were prepared for large slices of beach time. But Alexis was as mesmerized as we by the Caribbean islands’ explosion of color, sound and fantasy. At several stops there were dancers in masks and giant glittery headdresses, their music of strangely addictive rhythms thumping and lilting about them. There were narrow little streets lined with pink, blue and yellow buildings topped with red-tiled roofs. At Grand Cayman, there were Black Coral workshops with artisans to watch, the Conch Shell House to admire and the Green Sea Turtle Farm, where open tanks held hatchlings as well as huge, indolent breeders. There was Martinique, where we bargained over exotic perfumes with vendors who spoke a musical Creole patois, sampled the famous white rum, listened to street musicians playing the beguine, and were bundled off in a hurry by our young antivivisectionist from the spectacle of a mongoose-and-snake fight.

At Charlotte Amalie there were Bluebeard’s Castle and an underwater observatory for viewing surreal coral cities, lumbering lobsters, giant barracuda and swooping eagle rays. At Grenada we strolled the fish and vegetable markets and bought spice sets--cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, thyme, cloves--tucked into little woven baskets. On the tidy Dutch island of Curacao, we watched the historic pontoon bridge open and shut for incoming water traffic, fed the flamingos and toured a distillery where the namesake sweet orange liqueur is produced.

Alexis carefully built a collection of coins from each stop, the prize specimen being Curacao’s “weird square nickels.”

The impact of a hopefully expectant American 7-year-old on local tradesmen was astounding. “Here, I lose money, the sale nets me zero, but how can I not give it to her for next to nothing when she’s just like my 8-year-old?” said a straw hat vendor. “Well, hokay, $5 the ride! My horse, she loves the little ones,” said a horse-cart driver. Our collection of Caribbean schlock swelled.

And always there were the matchless beaches. On most port stops, we managed an hour or two on the clean, pale sands, watching our great white-bowed home gently rocking offshore.

Christmas Eve found us nursing burnt noses and a bruised toe and trying to wash the sand out of our hair. The countdown to the Big Day seemed oddly irrelevant. We just weren’t up for it, Van and I agreed. Perhaps we’d skip the special evening program in the lounge. No way, said the family’s youngest voting member, by now slavishly obedient to ship’s bells and the Program of the Day.

Candle-lighted and pine-scented, the lounge was unrecognizable as the scene of calypso revues and bingo. The entire passenger population, it seemed, greeted one another in subdued church tones. Staff members, young, handsome, schooled in joviality, were as unfamiliar as the setting in their white shirts and Sunday faces, entering in solemn pairs, carrying candles. Programs rustled, a baby cried and the great jubilant melodies engulfed us--noel, noel, noel. . . . We were aware of Alexis, feet stuck out stiffly in their new patent leather pumps, a sprig of holly bobbing on her ponytail, piping with all the fervor of a lark welcoming the day. It was one of those moments when strangeness and artifice are transformed into the familiar and authentic, when the spirit resonates to remembered and beloved themes.

There were readings, carefully eclectic and cross-cultural for so diverse an audience, with references to Christmas in Wales, Italy, Greece, Israel, Thailand. Cesar, a Filipino waiter, stood proudly with his handmade bamboo lantern, the kind that hangs throughout the Christmas season outside houses back home. The chaplain spoke of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra in ancient Turkey, becoming a folk saint, and of the name Santa Claus evolving from the Dutch “Sinterklaas,” of Hanukkah and the giving spirit in all its forms around the world. When the program closed, we all sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” with real feeling.

Christmas morning in our cabin brought an elegantly costumed Greek doll and an authentic-looking toy camera with a viewer that projected lush Caribbean panoramas with each click of the shutter. (Santa had become attached to the ship’s shops.) These and a psychedelically colored stuffed parrot from Teodoro lay beside a 15-inch plastic Christmas tree borrowed from the dining salon.

Santa was on duty in the main lounge, having arrived “by helicopter” without the aid of Donner and Blitzen, sunglasses concealing any evidence of a very late Christmas Eve celebration. So authentic was his get-up that even the adults failed to recognize Larry, the evening revue’s comedian. Olga had to help him distribute the largess; the cruise line hadn’t stinted. The dolls were sumptuously exotic, the mechanized racers gleaming with lacquer and chrome. The elaborately blase teenagers received designer sweatshirts imprinted with a plump duck lying, rump up, on a beach towel with the suggestion, “Warm your buns in the Caribbean.”

Later in the day, there was a traditional American banquet of turkey and all the fixings, topped off by an impressive plum pudding.

The menu was its own gift to Alexis. Early in the voyage, she looked at the arugula salad, sauteed veal with mushrooms and pommes parisienne and asked, “Can’t I have just plain spaghetti or a hamburger?” Our attentive steward, Antonio, soon appeared with the Lamborghini of hamburgers, lavished with embellishments that spoke of the chef’s creativity. Next night, we knew to ask for it plain.

At Christmas dinner, the table talk was mellow. “I can’t believe it’s Christmas,” said a woman from Detroit. “I haven’t worked all day in the kitchen, I haven’t had to struggle with a tree in the house, I don’t have 25 relatives here for the weekend, and I’m not exhausted.”

An eventful week later, a group of us gathered for “bottles overboard,” a celebration of the send-off of messages written by the young set, who now fancied themselves the shipboard scribes.

“I wrote some Chinese words in mine in case it gets that far,” an 11-year-old bragged.

Alexis was silent, eyes glazed with the possibilities beyond the horizon. In her bottle was a message that read: “Whoever finds this, if you are a good person and kind to animals, you can visit me in Albany, California. Please bring some special suveneers of your country so I can learn what it’s like. P.S. You will see the Goldin Gate Bridge and many other famus things.”

We thought of Teodoro’s latest pillow card: “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.”