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This entry for 2021 will be an odd one, because I'm not writing primarily about my parents, grandparents, or relations. For them, Christmas means being with family.
For me, it's the chance to travel to strange places. Now when I retire, I will have other off-season options so weird Uncle Joe and delightful Aunt Nancy will, God willing, be regular features at family gatherings at Christmas. But until then, I love to be on the road at Christmas. Why?
Let me turn to one of my favorite travel writers, the multi-talented Patrick Leigh Fermor. Not only was he a tremendous writer, but he was a war hero so talented he became one of Ian Flemings' inspirations for James Bond: Fermor kidnapped the highest-ranking German officer captured in the Second World War. Because Fermor was so fluent in several dialects of Greek, he'd posed as a Cretan partisan and had a cave waiting for his prisoner. While preparing for a speed boat to take the Nazi into captivity in Egypt, Fermor and his enemy had drinks in the cave and traded poetry from the ancient Greek, Horace.
Oh. Why I travel at Christmas? Here's Fermor from A Time of Gifts, the first of three works he wrote about an epic walk from The Netherlands to Istanbul, in 1933 as the Nazi shadow lengthened over Europe. In one passage he struggles to recall a Christmas along the southern reaches of the Rhine River:
"Only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles. . . .Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass . . . . And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl's long fair hair under a tam o' shanter." This passage captures the magic of travel to me, fragments of other lives you meet, people kind or unkind (that ass of a railway clerk in Canterbury!) who enter your lives for a few moments and then vanish for all eternity.
It can drive one mad to think when walking down a foreign street that "I am passing by hundreds of stories I'll never know." There they are! Then they are gone.
It can also make you humble. Americans are so full of themselves, so it's good medicine. We think we are important, yet our world and view of it are flickers in eternity. Travel at Christmas, a holiday we share with the rest of Christendom (says a devout Deist) reinforces our essential smallness. Christ's birth and mission were not, in the end, about our little personal drama, our bills due, our anxieties. Whether the only begotten Son of God or (to me) brilliant heretic Rabbi who had read Plato, Jesus had a mission that was big, and he changed history. The most brilliant thing he said , at least in my estimation?
Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
You cannot stop to admire the lilies of the field while writing a hundred Christmas cards to folks you barely know, or when rushing about to buy gifts (Nan and I exchange none; we take a trip together). Fermor left his family at Christmas, so when he finally did return, he'd have a full soul.
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