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December 19, 2003
International Christmas
The biggest holiday, and holy day of the year, is still a wonderful occasion. The best thing about it is the opportunity for families to get together. That's a good thought to keep in mind, as many of us trudge through crowded airport terminals this Christmas season, flying back to frozen lands like Minnesota and Wisconsin. I've heard all the complaints about Christmas. It's too commercialized, like a television advertisement showing a cartoon of Santa Claus gliding down a ski slope on a Norelco electric razor. Or it's just for kids. I don't know about many of our readers, but I enjoy photographing the various Christmas events, the caroling and the plays. It's funny how we never tire of hearing those same songs again around Christmastime, like Andy Williams singing, "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" The hassle of shopping for those presents is rewarded by the look on the eyes of the people who you present them to. When I was a kid I hated to get underwear and socks for Christmas. Now I could use more underwear and socks. As a boy, the day after Christmas was the saddest day of the year, having to wait 364 days until the next Christmas. While flying up to the northern climates I thought of how boring it would be for our relatives going through a long, cold winter in someplace like Minneapolis without the Christmas-New Year's holiday period to break up the monotony. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that Christmas was supposed to be a time when it snowed. It's supposed to be like a Currier and Ives painting, riding a horse-drawn sleigh through the snow in some quaint New England village with a white church. In reality, Pahrump probably looks more like Bethlehem. It can, however, be a nice occasion to take the time to celebrate the season of winter right after the winter solstice. Even Pahrump residents can take some time out to go sledding in the Spring Mountains, make a snowman, or try ice-skating. Usually, back home in Milwaukee, it would be near zero at night around Christmas but wouldn't really snow until the week between Christmas and New Years, when we'd get dumped on by a big storm. A few years ago I met a friend in Lone Pine, Calif., over Christmas Eve. I hoped to see a nice view of the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas towering over the Owens Valley, but due to the unusual dry spell, there was very little of the white stuff. My friend remarked he just barely made it back to Northern Nevada, as all the gas stations along U.S. Highway 395 were closed Christmas Day. Luckily, a station at Topaz Lake was open, on the Nevada border, where the casino was open 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. But why not shut down at least one day each year for Christmas? I was amazed to find people gambling as usual in Las Vegas one Christmas Eve while traveling from Elko to Laughlin. Then there's often a case of some dastardly crime that occurs on Christmas. I guess some criminals don't take a holiday. While working in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, we'd often have to write about someone stealing presents from someone's outdoor display. I wondered whether they should get double the penalty, just for committing it over Christmas. At the newspaper, we usually had some Christmas-type story. Last year, at the Pahrump Valley Times, it was about a local artist who designed an ornament for the White House Christmas tree. Once, while working in Texas, I wrote about a boy who donated a kidney to his ailing mother over Christmas. I'm sure there will be another similar type story this year. Sometimes I do reminisce about what I did in Christmases past. I spent one Christmas Day working on a tugboat on the Intracoastal Waterway in Louisiana. Another year, while vacationing in Southeast Asia, I was traveling on a government boat in Indonesia for two days, where the only food in the galley was fish heads, rice and hot chilis. Probably the most bizarre Christmas however, occurred in 1988. I was going on a three-week vacation in the West African country of Cameroon. I took a cheaper flight from Paris to Lagos, Nigeria. When the UTA flight arrived in Lagos, the stewardess announced on the intercom it was strictly forbidden to take photographs around the airport. When I exited off the plane, the gangway was unlit and pitch black at 5 a.m. I then stepped out to the brightly lit airport terminal, where a group of big African men in military uniforms were standing at immigration. Immigration officers were friendly and efficient, but customs was something else. The customs officers pretended to be asleep. A well-dressed man in front of the customs booth asked to see proof I had money to enter the country. I handed him my traveler's checks and bent over to put a magazine back in my bag. When I looked up he was gone - with my travelers checks. The customs officers then "woke up." I sat in the airport terminal listening to Christmas carols on the intercom, wondering how I would make it clear across the country to Cameroon, the next country to the east. I had only $65 cash. Government law didn't allow the importation of foreign currency into Nigeria. Fortunately, I received my Cameroon visa that morning from the embassy. The next day I was on a bus to Oron, a border town with a lot of tough-looking smugglers. A teenage boy who looked no older than 15 came into the immigration shed with a box full of stamps to stamp my passport. The day after Christmas, a holiday called Boxing Day in British Commonwealth countries like Nigeria, I caught a motorized dugout canoe called a piroque into Cameroon. The customs officer in Cameroon thought we were all smugglers, and threatened to throw me in jail until I could show him a travel guide. I didn't have one. Fortunately a fellow passenger went into a back room for a quick talk with the officer, both emerged and the officer let us all go. A couple of days later I was granted a refund from American Express for all my travelers checks in Douala, Cameroon. Merry Christmas everyone! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwanzaa! Write to Mark Waite at mwaite@spvtimes.com. |
