Christmas in strange places is still Christmas…but it’s definitely not the same!

I grew up in New England, on the coast of Maine. Christmas there was storybook. Not always a “white Christmas,” as you might imagine, but definitely crisp and cold and decorated. It always looked like Christmas, even if it hadn’t snowed.

Our family celebrated Christmas as if it were the source of our existence, which, in many respects it was. Our life was built around our church, started in the late 1800s by our Danish immigrant great grandparents and 4 other families. And our church was always decorated handsomely, and sung into the season with cantatas and joyous carols. It was the sort of Christmas Hallmark used to celebrate, before it bought into DEI and other fictions.

I celebrated Christmas in some unusual places in the years when I lived “away.” Christmas in the Caribbean was always a little exotic, especially the year all my cruise shop staff got invited to the French ambassador’s home in Cap Haitian (a period of time when Haiti was safe and appealing, the late 60s and early 70s). And Christmas in Key West and Vegas never seemed quite as festive as the New England Christmases I grew up with.

I had a quiet Christmas on the little farm in Tuscany. But it was, at least, Christmassy. Italy. The mountains of Tuscany. Snow. Sheep. Old churches and candles and things. And that first year, there was so much snow it was days before we could get down the mountain. But we ate well, and we roasted chestnuts in the fireplace.

We roasted chestnuts in Slovenia, too. And went to a carolling event in an ancient village in Istria, where, in a thousand year old building turned into a “restaurant” for the event, a group of carolers found out I was American and sang “Amazing Grace” for me. In English, which none of them spoke. To me, like a gift. Standing in a half circle around our group.  It was a moment of such sublime beauty it still brings me to tears to remember it.

That was the same Christmas, 1997, where I got a pair of deck shoes from my mom — and I had to pay the tax to “free” them from the post office. I needed them for trip to Istanbul, to deliver a 35 foot sailboat ; it was a job, and if I could have afforded a new pair of deck shoes….I was making about $50 a week, writing for the local paper, and working on boat deliveries to augment that.

(My mom told me later that she “educated” that shipping department about tax laws in foreign countries! Their policy was to put the value on the label of anything shipped overseas. And, as anyone in a high tax country in Scandinavia or Eastern Europe can tell you: that pretty much takes the “gift” out of the equation.)

But even though that Christmas involved living in a 500 year old cottage with a dirt floor, on the border overlooking a crossing where the shooting had only recently stopped, it wasn’t my oddest Christmas.

That prize goes to Christmas 1976. I was the traveling assistant to the Liaison for Western Affairs for a middle eastern country, one of our allies. His job was to present his then-very undeveloped country with options for a cash creating industry, as it is one of the few in the area with little oil. So we crisscrossed the western world meeting finance ministers, scions of wealth and industry, and marketing managers in giant international companies.

In that job I met princes, queens and sultans. I learned to walk backwards out of rooms they were in. I learned to bow and curtsy. My boss was impressed, because Americans were known to be independent. But, hey, it was the 70s and I was carving new territory just having a job like that, so…

That Christmas we had to smuggle a Siemans copier into Cairo. Sounds ridiculous, right? But there had been no Camp David accords. (I couldn’t go to Israel with the Arabian visas I had in my passport.) And Siemans is a Jewish company. But it was the best copier in Europe at the time and that’s what the Egyptian office of my boss’s business wanted. It wasn’t that hard to do. We always flew a private charter and I’m sure there was baksheesh involved.

But let me backtrack a bit. That year I had spent almost two weeks of December in London. The office and quarters were in Knightsbridge, in a tony neighborhod between the palace and Harrods. At Christmas it was Dickens! And every Christmassy romance ever. My boss was in the US and I had actual personal time, so I reveled in Christmas London. I walked the cobblestone streets, shopped in Knightsbridge and ate in pie shops. I met old friends in cozy pubs and walked home in snow flurries.

It was a living Christmas movie.

Then, two days before the holiday itself, we left for the Middle East. And not to the Holy Land, either. I felt cheated. All that Christmas build up, and then off to a land with no Christmas.

The flight itself was a little more dramatic than usual, too. We stopped in Munich, and both landing and take-off were in nail-biting, ice-skidding white-out blizzard. I seriously doubt commercial planes were going in and out of that airport that day, and seem to remember some serious discussions between the boss and the pilots, but that was where the copier was, so…

But when we landed in Cairo it was nighttime, and the drive into the city was amazing, because in those days there were a lot of Christians still living in Cairo — and there were hundreds of balconies decorated with Christmas lights! I was astonished. The boss and the Cairo driver explained about the Christian population, which was unusual then, and is very unlikely to still exist these nearly 50 years later.

Christmas Eve my boss had meetings all day in the hotel, for which I was not needed, the boss planned for the Cairo chauffeur to take me out to the pyramids. I never got to see any of the places we traveled to, and he knew my birthday was in a few days, so it was a thoughtful gesture. My experience with that culture is that gifts are commonplace and often generous in a monetary sense, but “thoughtfulness” is not a currency. (It was the only time I saw the pyramids, too, in many trips in and out of Cairo.)

The following day, on Christmas, in my boss’s home country, he again did something unexpected: he asked the Christian chef (“stolen” from some fancy hotel in Morocco) to make a “traditional English Christmas dinner” for me, and the English woman who managed his home there. So that afternoon she and I and the chef sat together at one end of a table that could seat 25, and ate turkey, and all the fixings that the chef could find on the Persian Gulf.

Our chef was not very proficient in English and very uncomfortable eating with us (women sat in separate dining rooms, even at formal occasions), so he said grace with us and took a plate into the kitchen. But we enjoyed the weirdness — a day off was weird for both of us! — and stayed at the table to play Scrabble with our coffee. We often did that when I was there. We used the big Oxford dictionary from the boss’s library. She had fun trying to trick me with English spellings, and I had enjoyed annoying her with my American pronunciation. (She was a great gal, and it pains me not to remember her name, but all my journals from that time were lost in a stolen trunk; a story for another time.)

The following day I flew back to Munich, to the house in the Bavarian Alps, where I was finalizing a cost-evaluation project on the property. But my adventure wasn’t quite finished: I was forced to get a cholera shot and wait in German immigration for 3 hours (to make sure I didn’t die from it, I guess.) Egypt had had an outbreak during the time we’d been there. No chances taken in those days.

It was decades before cell phones, so I had no way to contact our driver, but he figured it out and waited. He was also a good guy, an Englishman who my boss had put into service in the Bavarian home of the boss’s boss. Who was the king, so to speak. (I still try to be vague, even 47 years later, so instilled were we all in “security.” I have absolutely NO pictures from this period, either. None.)

The chauffeur was planning to return to Britain and had a business all worked out, and he and I were so engaged in conversation along the Autobahn, that the German highway patrol pulled us over: they knew the Mercedes limo, the diplomatic plates – and we were going so slow they thought something was wrong – that slowing down was the driver’s way of messaging them. No one goes slow on the Autobahn! We had some laughs about that and continued. Faster.

When we turned the last corner of the drive, high above the picturesque Alpine valley, some deer were pawing the snow on the lawn, and disappeared into the tall fir trees. The mountain and roof were covered in deep snow, and the village twinkled below.

That night I unwrapped my family’s gifts from Maine, in cozy room in a picturesque historic chalet, high in the Alps, and looked out at the magical snowy vista, as if Christmas in Cairo and the Persian Gulf had just been a weird dream.